Linzin Week, Day 7: Beauty
I never thought of myself as a beautiful girl. It was just something that never concerned me. I can't say I wasn't vain, but it had nothing to do with my looks. I was proud of my strength, I was proud because I was tough. If my muscles made me look less like a typical young lady, I'd rather have had the muscles. When I took a knife to the face I knew objectively that the cuts were deep enough to need a healer, but we were days outside the city and there were no healers to be found. It took too long. When we finally found one, he was able to close the cuts cleanly, but he told me that there was no way to prevent the scars and if they were to fade, it would take years.
I didn't care at first. My mother's hands and feet were covered with a network of fine white scars that you couldn't see until you were inches away, so I assumed this scar would be equally inconspicuous. I was so excited to get back home to Tenzin that I actually forgot about it. I arrived home in the early afternoon and decided to take a nice bath before he got back to our house. I even was humming a song when I stepped to the mirror to brush out my hair and saw my new face for the first time. Two angry red lines snaked over my jawline and onto my cheek, nearly reaching up to my eye. As I said, I never thought of myself as vain, but this was too much. How would anyone see anything but these scars when they looked at my face? I couldn't. How would Tenzin see anything else? For the first time in my life, I cried over my looks.
Tenzin found me like that, at least an hour later. I'd bawled for a while sitting on the bathroom floor, sniffled for a bit while I experimented with ways of styling my hair that hid the right side of my face, then cried harder when nothing I tried worked. I'd dragged myself into our bedroom, closed the windows, and curled up under the sheets. He saw my things in the front hallway, so he knew I must be home, but I couldn't bring myself to answer him when he called me. Before he found me wallowing in misery like I'd been doing all afternoon, I tried to pull myself together enough to convince him things were fine. It was hopeless.
When he walked into the bedroom I wasn't sniffling any more, but my eyes were obviously red and puffy and my hair was piled bizarrely across the right side of my face. He immediately sat down next to me and took my hands in his, begging to know what had happened. While I was still trying to collect myself enough to talk reasonably, he reached up to brush the hair out of my face. I flinched away without thinking, but my hair shifted enough for him to see the scars underneath. That was enough to start me crying again.
To his credit, he was quick to understand what my problem was. I sat hunched in a miserable ball and he didn't try to wrap me in his arms or force me to talk to him more. He got up to grab a comb from the other side of the room, then sat down and began to gently brush out my tangled hair. The feeling of his fingers running through my hair and carefully working out the knots was soothing enough, but then he began to talk to me. Simply, he told me everything about me that he thought was beautiful. I was astonished by how much he had to say. There were little things like the way my eyes tightened when I got ready to bend metal, or bigger things like the way I always seemed poised and ready to take on the world. I barely even remember most of what he said because there was so much I wouldn't have ever imagined he cared about. When he started talking I was crying, but by the time he finished I was blushing. It still bothered me when I saw my face in the mirror or ran a finger over my cheek, but I couldn't help smiling when I remembered how this man assured me I was the most beautiful woman in the world.