I am not much. I met a girl back in high school who told me those words, thinking and asking myself why she would say such a thing as though she could measure her worth in teaspoons. Even then I knew that it was not easy growing up in a world where the definition of beauty is measured by inches and proportions. So I stared at her, temporarily forgetting how to say the word “pretty,” convinced that it is only a six-letter word with fairly no significance to a stranger, if it will only come out empty from my mouth.
I rode the school service vehicle that late afternoon, counting streetlights and divisions of rice fields. If my count reached as far as my fingers could tally I started all over again, with the thought that I could always remember the last number, but still failing to count exactly how many. There is always a chance of missing a broken streetlight because I could not see it in the dark. With all the atoms that exist around us, it is so easy to miss something beautiful when the light does not hit it or when it does not have a light of its own. Like her.
That night I had dinner with my parents and my sister who, out of habit, asked me how my day went. I told them it went like it always did, with a 15-minute recess break, a 20-minute lunch period, and classes in between. I did not tell them about the girl I met; I was not planning to tell anybody about it, as though it were a whispered secret, because for the first time I was listening and not waiting for my turn to talk. I was seeing and not just looking.
I went to bed at 10 o’clock, half-forgetting about the girl who told me those words. I fell asleep with my sister next to me, and the lights went out. That night, I dreamed about finding my sister in our bathroom, her face half-buried in the toilet bowl, her two fingers pushed down her throat, forcing herself to vomit.
Like any other dream, it felt real.
She is 16 but she feels like an old beat-up truck, a dry riverbed, because her skin has wrinkles too deep and it hurts like sinkholes during an earthquake. She vomits M&Ms and oatmeal, and something that smells like rum. Try as much as she can, she vomits it all out, still leaving a stain on her shirt, like a birthmark or baby teeth, parts of her she once believed she needed.
She feels fat. She says that like a prayer, as though her skin is sin itself, burning some place defined by the empty magazines under her bed. She says that after she eats half of every peanut butter sandwich and after watching reruns of 20-minute sitcoms that temporarily make her happy. She says it every time we go to plus-size stores to buy new clothes, because she treated her hands like scissors.
She says that sometimes, yet she feels it always. So I hold her.
I hold her, treating her flesh like a sheet of diamonds. I hold her like a laugh from our childhood; it will only physically last for a few minutes but is still as clear as I remember it at that moment. I hold her, hoping I can make her future husband so envious he will run back in time just to witness the hurt and protect her. I hold her the way she deserves to be held, like a ticket to a favorite movie that will not be airing in 10 years and yet still choosing to not miss it for the world.
I woke up without a scream in my throat, believing, since I was 12, that there are countless things worse than nightmares. I opened my eyes and I saw my sister’s silhouette in the dark. Even when the lights are off, I know that she is beautiful and I was wrong. I was wrong to think that something like the night drowns that which is beautiful, when it is merely asking us to treat it more than darkness, to look a little harder.
The first thing I did that morning was to tell my sister what she deserved to hear, and she laughed at the words like I were a clown delivering a punch line. Then she thanked me because she knew I meant it. The same way the girl I met thanked me the next time I saw her. I know a mere act will not change anything that conspires in the universe, and “beautiful” is just another nine-letter word. I just wanted to remind them that they were so much more than what they deemed themselves to be. So much more.
Kharla Mae Brillo, 19, is a fourth year psychology-literature student at the University of the Philippines Visayas.