Sometimes I think I would do the proverbial things you think you wouldn’t, all for something as proverbially silly (is it?) as beauty. Like kill; push a red button, slice a blue vein. Because I want so much to feel that skein of breathless possibility shimmer over my spotless skin. Because no one I know ever wrote a song for an unsightly face.

They say it’s ephemeral, that’s the argument against it. Beauty is fleeting, character lasts forever. Or some variation of that. And it’s true, it will die. But it will have been, and an end is nothing in the face of what has been.

Besides, life is ephemeral, and that’s the ultimate democratic gift. Everyone who is has life. Why don’t we all get to be beautiful?

(And the answer to this is the whispered truth they don’t tell us; that it isn’t free—it isn’t luck or destiny that has brought you this, these perfect lines and fathoms-deep eyes. Somehow, somewhere along the way, you have paid the price and you have killed, killed, killed. You have been borne by oppressors and murderers and the daughters of oppressors and murderers, or you have broken someone, or you have taken something. It doesn’t come for free. You pay for it. If there is beauty on your face, there has been blood on your hands.)

As my beliefs floundered, as my thoughts grew mired in flux, I found an anchor in the numbers all around.

I counted. I counted ceaselessly. I counted my steps when I climbed the stairs, and I felt fear on the third step and the thirteenth step. I thought of good things on the fourth step and the seventh step. I counted the laps I swam and the bites I ate, and you would think it was about the calories but it’s not, it’s not. It’s about keeping the numbers right, keeping the butterfly’s wings from flapping wrong, a desperate attempt to maintain a balance I know I cannot, but that I also know I must. Numbers, counting, balance, trying.

I was bad today and I ate a banana. Carbs.
The little pills that make me thin
And sometimes I think, what have I become?

Every day, I go for a run. Where once I rode the buses, now I run. I run because, well, there aren’t any quiet buses in India. None where you can just sit and be left alone, left alone to be. No, there’s shoving and filth and men with dirty eyes. There’s excoose-pliz, pliz-medam, ektu-adjust. And too many bodies. Pressed up, pushed in, packed. Packed like sardines.

But I also run because I can’t sit still anymore. I cannot let the weight of my thoughts settle into me. I cannot stop, cannot let the thoughts catch up. I count.

I run and I count, I count and I run.