“To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.” – Ocean Vuong, ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’
Swimming, I fight the current, wondering how much more buoyancy salt water really affords. From the dark depths of the ocean, its gaze is felt and intuited. Somewhere a shark circles. Somewhere a giant squid torpedoes through deeper darkness. Somewhere the ocean pulls from the shore, itself pulled by the moon, and somewhere I feel the sand displaced beneath my feet, the way the receding tide eventually takes us all down.
In a summer when we are mostly bound to our homes, if we’re being safe, a different kind of wave laps at my bare feet. In the gentle ripples of the pool, a book rests by my side – the only way to reach the beach. When the sharks arrive, when the squid’s tentacles wrap their way around the water, I am not to be found. Only a swimsuit floats where once I was, eerily bobbing in ghostly fashion, the way fashion feels like such a ghost these days.
In so many ways, it’s simply another shedding of another guise – a guise I once thought made up the most of me, but fashion, and an enduring love-there-of, was only ever a mode too. It lasted longer than so many others… The trickster shape-shifts again ~ the jester and the king become one. The summer sun casts its own spell.
There, in the space between water and light, I cast off the frills and frivolity, and, naked, swim away to another sea, leaving behind the threads of some silkworm, floating like the plucked plumage of a water-shirking bird-of-prey.
There is something gorgeous about being unseen, too, something gorgeous about not being hunted. That is the place where true beauty resides.
