I WANT TO BE BEAUTIFUL

Debuted at Substack's bathhouse reading, "A Night of Desire"

But first, the thank you’s:

Shout out to

Camille Sojit Pejcha

for being an amazing host,

Matt Starr

and

Sophia Efthimiatou

for inviting me and for making this happen (psst check out

Dream Baby Press

), and my talented co-readers

Mary H.K. Choi

,

jaboukie

,

Brontez Purnell

,

Jenna Wortham

,

oldjewishmen

,

Cat Cohen

, and

Liara Roux

.

And thank you to everyone who showed up, I KNOW YALL HAD FUN! If you missed it aka are in terrible regret, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one:

Here goes:

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I want to be beautiful—the kind that lives forever in mythologies and novels and wet dreams behind closed eyes, like perfume soaked into the fibers of clothing days later. The kind that makes poets and artists shed big, opalescent tears.

I don’t want to be cute. I don’t want to be sweet. I want to be beautiful and I want beauty that tilts the world in my favor, making people ache without them knowing why. I want beauty that’s electrifying, the kind that makes you feel like you’re being burned alive all along your nerves.

I want to be the face in the frame, the figure stretched across a canvas in the languid posture of a spoiled cat who has never needed to chase anything because everything comes to her in time.

I want the perfect body, not for function but for worship. I'm not just moisturizing, I'm conducting a seance to resurrect my glow. 10 hours of sleep, Pilates, and beef bone broth—my routine is a shrine to transformations, a cocoon for the butterfly. Moony eyes muddied with brown mascara, thin white shirts that blur the shape of breasts, mismatched studs on the fat lobes of ears, lipstick-stained teeth like pinkish poker chips, I want to be messy and still be adored.

I want to be art. I don’t want to age. I want to be looked at and never forgotten, desired and never owned. I want to be a painting, something eaten by the eyes.

Maybe I am a Klimt, skin pressed with gold leaf like a Byzantine icon, passion made holy—beauty, immortalized through flowers with petals open wide. Maybe I am a Vermeer, head turned, lips half-parted, pearl earring exposed—a moment in perpetual wonder. Maybe I am a Matisse, a pretty concubine poured onto a bed of Arabian peacock feathers, spine curved in a crescent like a nude model at the center of an art classroom.

I want to be Helen of Troy glowing at the carnage from her tower. I want to be Lady Godiva sidesaddled on her stallion, naked thighs bouncing against rippling horse flesh. I want to be Venus rising from the sea, salt-slick, sticky, and dripping with brine.

I want to be your muse, your sickness, your obsession, your undoing—light of your life, fire in your loins, your sin, your soul. I want my existence to feel like a punishment to anyone who does not have me, and a wound to anyone who does—tender, red, and impossible to look away from. I want to throb under your skin, to make the rest of them jealous.

in true lover girl fashion i wrote mine by hand

I study beautiful people, observing them from across the table, the way they pull beauty over themselves like a silk dress and move as if nothing can touch them but the light. I look at the way they tuck their hair behind their ears, the curve of their smile, the folds in their eyelids—I think if I can master those details, I might stitch them over my own skin, and maybe then I’ll feel soft and golden and complete.

I want to be beautiful not only because I think it would make me loved but because I think it might make me real. That maybe if I were beautiful, I can slip into the story without anyone noticing, and I’d find my place, an outline I could fit into. I want beauty that feels like the freedom to take up space.

I want to be impossible to photograph correctly, never quite real except in person, where I devastate. I have been betrayed by the lens, and I have blamed the camera when a picture of me didn’t deliver the fantasy I was serving in my head.

But catch me on the right day, with the right curls in my hair and that confidence that hits like tequila? That’s when wanting to be beautiful turns into being downright unstoppable.

Peace out 🍎,

Go on, indulge:

How badly are you allowed to yearn?

Diary of a lover girl

When life lifts up her skirt