The Search for Beauty beautiful (adjective) beau·ti·ful | \ ˈbyü-ti-fəl \ 1: very attractive in a physical way 2: giving pleasure to the mind or the senses
by Michelle Wu
— Merriam Webster Dictionary
I remember the time when the most magical part of every day was waking up early in the morning with no clue of what would happen later in the day. Before my internal clock reached puberty and got all fucked up, I would be up at 7 AM—even on weekends and holidays, much to the dismay and exhaustion of my parents—ready for the adventure that awaited me. What made every single day so goshdarn beautiful back then? Perhaps it was the promise that there was going to be something that I had never experienced before since there were fewer days to compare the new ones to. Some of the loveliest things from my childhood were my old textbooks and notebooks covered with my doodles, my ratchet rock collection, worms, and flowers. I remember when I was much younger, around seven years old, I had an empty egg carton filled with the rocks that I collected while on walks or hikes with my family. The yellow foam of the egg carton was scratched up and dirty from the growing collection of rocks, but I wouldn’t let my parents throw it out and replace it. Sure, I loved
Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good; A shining gloss that fadeth suddenly; A flower that dies when first it ‘gins to bud; A brittle that’s broken presently; A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower, Lost, vaded, broken, dead within an hour. — William Shakespeare
my smooth “egg rock” and the large lumpy one with crystals embedded in it, but I thought that the carton made the collection stunning. Was it objectively beautiful for anyone else seeing it? Probably not. My parents hated the carton with a burning passion. I guess the beat-up sides and the broken lid didn’t fit the cleanliness of the house. But for me, the beauty was derived from the satisfaction of seeing how well-loved the carton looked. My notebooks were well-loved with my bored, daydreaming mind scribbling art everywhere. I thought it was so beautiful to revisit later, even though it was a mess of spirals and eyes and intricate flowers. And bugs. I hate bugs now, but I used to think their colorful bodies and thin, crooked legs made them look so delicate. I thought worms were beautiful because they were squishy and fun to play with. Dandelions were my favorite flowers. I would always have to fight the urge to pick one that was bright yellow, just so I could impatiently wait until the end of the season to blow the fluffy white seeds into the air.
As people grow older the innocent beauty of everyday life fades into mundanity. But when does something lose its beauty? Is it when the excitement fades into normalcy? I don’t remember when, but I do know that one day, the new doodle in my notebook suddenly looked messy compared to the neat blue lines and the words kept strictly in between the margins. The doodle was no longer a beautiful product of my creative (and extremely distracted) mind. It became a blemish on the paper, and I stared at it until I decided to erase it from the page. This is still something I notice while in class. The habit of doodling when bored in class hasn’t disappeared, but the more I stare at the once-clean margins of my page, the more I feel an urge to remove it. The appreciation for
