Beautiful enough...for what?

It lands before me, blurry, blinding. I can only glance askance.

I can’t make sense of it other than to think it is the end of the world. I prepare to be destroyed. Soared sentences fly on spokes of light. They, it(?) land as notes played on my brain.

Is this how the world ends? I’m surprisingly calm. At least no pain, yet. It is clear to me the light could obliterate or do any number of other things to me if it wished to.

Instead it - no, she - talks.

No, it isn’t that, a world ending. I just wanted to understand you.

I pause, confused, it moves in and out of mirage. It says

you seem
(I feel the reaching, casual, like hands collecting scrabble tiles but plucked out of my mind, a bursty jolt each time)
sad tonight

I’m repulsed, weight rocked back on my heels by the comment

A branch of thought grasps, a star?
Guess I should have had a wish, but here we are

Instead I heard sad and rasp back:
I don’t feel pretty enough. I walked around today and all I see is time eroding me. New lines in my skin as I watch myself die.
Do you ever not feel pretty or I guess, beautiful enough

she ebbs flows, burns glows, edges fringing the sand. An instinct makes me almost shout at her to step back and not get burned but she interrupts to say

I may not understand ‘pretty’? And beautiful enough for what?

Beautiful enough for what

Moments skitter out of my memories, over the sand and onto me and I struggle to answer

For what
wait for what?
For what?
FOR WHAT?

I don’t mean to yell it, I actually hack it out like a hyena in hysteria

She’s sparkling in my eyeline and my shaky footed shock launches me wrongway over the steps to the beach. A railing cleaves my back and I’m falling. Longer than falling should have taken, eternities between me and toes touching even the expected hit of ground or pain. There is a crunch but I can’t tell if it is brain cells or seashells.

When I land, lights are brighter than my hold on my body so I just think. She’s gone.

Something nebula and nebulous sticks in my throat - I’ll never see a star again. I awake in a soup of antiseptic smells and feeble beeps.

I should have spent more time with her. Told her anything or everything, about beauty or ugliness, shining or shadow. Each tiny human thing in between wanting and being wanted.

Wherever I am the lights are dull but blinding and not like her at all. My eyes and head calibrate and reality clocks me like delivery of a dewy dream logic you know governs you.

I know now: I’m 96 years old, survival orchestrated by machines and whirs. People I hadn’t built yet in my last memory of the star sit in chairs nearby inconvenienced. I smell like the death courting me. I feel its hands like a small fire in several organs, keeping them warm for some other purpose than my survival.

I struggle to catch the breath that may be my last and I see her again, inside and out of my IV bag, refracted and brilliant. My linoleum audience pious, oblivious. I want to scream LOOK - A STAR but there’s tubes down my throat.

I now see in each unknowably bright tendril of her in front of me why she is here. I was never religious but I see it. We pictured angels, but they were stars, or aliens, or something entirely else we have no word for. She is here to show me the speakeasy nextdoor to death. Something bigger than humans could imagine.

I ask, you’re here to take me back with you, that’s what is happening right? She whorls, dulls, brightens for a moment. But then, I can still hear her, the mental metronome, melodies and tones.

I’m sorry, you weren’t …enough. She skipped a beat and I can tell didn’t have the human word, but felt her thumbing back and forth between ‘distasteful’ and ‘disgraceful’.

There is a seizing hitch in my lungs, my blood floods entitled outrage. A flipbook of memories lands past my eyelids. It’s her.

The rhinoplasty, gory pictures the doctor sent me. Breast reduction. Weight loss surgery, hatred, anorexia, bulimia, cutting, needles in soft places. Breast augmentation. Leg lengthening surgery, lasers to burn hair out, acid on skin, fat fought against then later applied like concealer. Piercings, pandering, pathetic things. They may re-consume me. Maybe if all I was was someone hollow and hallowed, maybe those things should have ended me before I found myself here at 96.

But then I hear and feel an overture, notes passed as a question. She is orating physics, or inverting logic into landscapes of things I’ve never seen, no human has ever seen. She sends it as sonar sentiment towards me. Not quite words, but feelings, visions, with a side of judgment.

This would make you beautiful to us.

I sprint towards understanding her, she’s set filaments of light, illuminating me geometrically and inhumanly on a four-dimensional road. Glimpses flickering in front of me, inside of me.

I see me, how she’d see me to have beauty.

My sternum inverted into a multitude of arms, I hear it all break but they shine. Cracked molars melted and molded into a crown, skull dissolved and sizzled into biting eyes marble-white, to sit from within what used to be elbows. Hair concertinaed around me, stretch marks grotesquely compressed between strands then ossified as geological marvels.

It is alien, what she wants.

I feel the pressure on my chest, I see shapes in the room, shadows really, adjust themselves in a mix of laziness and concern to see if I’m well enough dead. I can hear the croak in my own throat, even half deaf.

She hears the keys played back from my brain I guess, the instinctual recoil from the creature she suggests. It’s horrifying.

She tones back, that’s what it takes.

I see it all. Why shouldn’t my rib cage be outside, my cheekbones storing fish bones, moon rock in my jaw that’s no longer a jaw, moss and blood down my sternu ---

The beat of aliveness bleeping at me becomes a shrill screech. I see the life leave me.

Oh, so they’ve started. I howl out a laugh, why not, after all of this?

I feel an excitement within me I haven’t felt since the first joys of childhood, a blue popsicle or mastering rollerblades. Build it up or tear it down, why not.

I feel hands one, two, three, break me.

CRACK.

Sternum gone, that’s a star.t. I’...m lo sing the threa d ejfdk

I struggle, but manage to focus on the glimmers in my peripheral vision. She speaks or sounds to me like edges of cashmere brushed over my arms and into my ears. I stand up wearing a vest of my wishbone chest, the IV ripping away some part of me already unimportant. The fluorescent roomful of people scream, cower.

Then we’re into the dark.