This is my first one-shot and also my first 'train of thought' story. I started it purely on an imagination high, with no particular character in mind. However, you'll probably be able to guess what character I came out with in the end.
Disclaimer: There's nothing to recognize or claim here besides my own ideas and thoughts.
Beauty.
I've often wondered what on earth people mean when they speak of beauty. What is this wonder oft spoken of as if it were the essence of everything holy?
The dictionary (and no, it's not Webster's) defines beauty as a pleasing quality associated with harmony of form or color, excellence of craftsmanship, truthfulness, originality, or another, often unspecifiable, property. Even the dictionary is unsure what the term encompasses. True, it states many categories that the word may apply to in speech, but in all these complicated, condescending descriptions, does it truly state what beauty is?
Someone may look at a young girl with fairly pleasing features and a somewhat welcoming air about her and pronounce the subject beautiful, but is this really beauty? I've often thought of beauty as something more than a nice face and agreeable manners. Something more than a simple smile or a well-proportioned body.
Indeed, to me, the ideal presentation that so many of us believe to represent beauty, I find repulsive. Almost as repulsive as some people find me.
By the time I was old enough to walk, my parents had abandoned me, dumping me into the nearest orphanage as quickly as they could. None of the orphans wanted anything to do with me and during that shallow time of childhood, I suppose I couldn't blame them. They were young, and cared only for what benefited them.
I had hoped, however, that when I started school things might have been different. They were not. And so, attempting to bury myself in old and forgotten volumes where I felt I belonged much more than with my fellow students, I struggled through the beginning of my life. In all my time at school, I never once discovered anything that I considered beautiful.
I overheard countless confessions of the deepest, most heartfelt love in the dusty corners of the library, but not once, in all those magnificent renditions did I hear love on account of something besides beauty. It was what everyone focused on, and I'm sure they still do, trying to find their ideal of beauty in this unaccountably dismal world.
Yet, even while my classmates strived to uncover this lovely vision, I valiantly labored on with my studies and finally, in my sixteenth year of life, I discovered my purpose.
And so, with this newfound development, I pursued my career with a vigor little known amongst people today. I pushed ahead, countless achievements in my path, to the very peak of my chosen field, victorious at last. For I had discovered it, the hidden beauty that so many spend lifetimes searching for yet never realizing it lies underneath their very noses.
People often assume, just because of the horrors I've faced in my lifetime, that I view all my surroundings in the same bleak, desolate way. Nothing could be farther from the truth. It is because of the terrors of my past that I can now see the true beauty that has eluded me all my life.
Beauty isn't all about pretty flowers cut into fantastic shapes, glittering statues of gold and various precious gems, but rather something more. Beauty is the way a desperate child looks into your eyes and seems ready to defy the world, if need be, to make you believe in his seemingly outrageous tale concerning a man who can pop out of thin air and vanish without a trace in a matter of seconds that he just witnessed in his bedroom. Beauty is the smile on the face of the hanged man that he knows something you will never know because you're only a law-abiding nobody who will never do anything considered unmistakably mad or strange. He gave his life for that experience and you can only stand and watch on the sidelines as his smile beckons to you with the hint of a mysterious and glorious discovery, a discovery which you shall never find and as the dirt is piled upon his grave you have nothing left to do but journey back to your safe and austere existence until you too can join him and press him for the answer to the ideal which you shall never know. For as soon as the question leaves your lips, he smiles the same mysterious smile that has haunted you for so long and you are left to wonder for eternity why you even bothered asking when you already knew the answer.