‘Taru, lose some weight na. You’ve got such a pretty face.’ All my hard-won American cool didn’t seem worth quite as much in the face of their absolute conviction that their lives were valid, were right, and slowly the venom soaked through. First, I was confused and then I was shocked and then I was concerned, and then, then I was acutely self-conscious. It is important to be beautiful, I learned. That lesson had somehow escaped me in the foggy foliage of Narnia, slipped my grasp along the cold alleys and corridors of my campus. But it started to show itself now, and again, I think: Do beautiful people know the tremendous possibility of their lives? Do they know that, at any given point of time, there is the possibility that someone is regarding them a revelation? Someone is watching the curves of their bones, feeling the relentless pull of the very way they are arranged.

Still, I feel a terrible longing (because that is all jealousy is, really) to be this, this thing we call beauty that lies under everything great that has ever been done. Every great monument, every timeless song, every blustering kid building resolve at the shining head of hair blocking his view of the blackboard.

Oh of course, I know—that old argument. It’s love, not beauty. Beauty lies in the loving eyes of the beholder. Yes, fine, all right. But where does love begin? That fire-riddled kind of love, I mean, not the slow burn of something that grows out of time and familiarity and necessity and age. The kind of love, in short, that writes songs and builds immortal white marble tombs—let’s call it passion; let’s, only for now, as a placeholder, give it that dirty little label. That strain of love (and there are those who would call it the only kind worth having) is rooted in beauty. It is rooted in the inspiration that comes from something that sets your breath on fire. It comes from feeling felled to your knees, cut off at the crease, because it is built like worship, looking up at something that high—at her beauty and his, at the relentless pull of the very way they are arranged. You have to do something, you have to get it out, you have to let them know, you have to.

It’s not even hard to do, because when you open the page, the words that come out are always about him. And when you touch the piano, her eyes dance across the keys that must become the notes to your song.