The Arsonist in the Photographs

Yeah, I said she’s beautiful. I know I just wrote that down.

A few weeks back, she was here in my apartment for Diwali. A totally bizarre domestic scene painted over the grey canvas of my life. She asked me to buy oil and clay lamps, and she lit them, flooding this miserable, shadowy cave with sudden, suffocatingly warm light. I took some photos of her. Just casual, digital evidence.

Today, sitting here paralyzed entirely by my own head, I opened those photos again.

And she just looks… devastating. Cute. Pretty. So staggeringly beautiful that looking at it feels like a physical blow to the chest.

But looking closer, staring at the exact geometry of her face, there’s something else. Her nose. It’s prominent. It isn’t sharp or politely sculpted like every generic movie actor’s. It’s different. It’s almost strawberry-shaped, taking up space on her face without apologizing for it, and it is so completely, devastatingly beautiful. And somehow, it perfectly matches her temper. Because it turns out that she is not that softly-spoken, ego-less creature I initially documented.

Lord, she has a temper. An incredibly, violently short temper. A flash-fire that burns incredibly hot and incredibly fast. It is profoundly difficult to handle. She isn’t the silent, calm saint I was obsessing over during those late-night philosophical rants. She is jagged. She is completely volatile.

And yet. Oh my god, she is so beautiful.

I am staring at these glowing, pixelated copies of her face, completely mesmerized by the danger she represents. ==Why didn’t I notice any of this before?== How could I have been so aggressively, clinically blind to the fire sitting right in the middle of my living room?