Glaze
My life started to revolve around one notion: to look good every day for Instagram. I was so lost in its glamorous world that I completely forgot what my real life looked like.
Staring into a mirror and not recognizing the creature gazing back is a hollowing phenomenon. To gradually become a stranger in the body you were born into is all too commonly seen.
Embers danced off of the vaulted ceiling, and the scholar found themself in the center of the library, on the very first floor.
Humanity’s most encapsulating muse since creation has been the earth. Imagine the roaring sea dormant, or a mountain transparent. Think of nature’s greatest forces captured in absolute flatness, yet they appear to float before the eyes.
There’s a whirlwind
Behind my eyes
Inside my brain
i'm painting you and i made a mistake
now i've got to go and wash this paint off my face.
The girls made of dance, swaddled in blue, anxiously await the ballet. While they rest behind the wine drapes, a different performance begins. Each girl sways to the rhythm of her own preparation hymn.
“But the Monarch? Alas, the Monarch sat alone on the cold stone floor, their flowing robes covering the entire chancel. They ran their hand along the fine fur that kept them warm through so many winters and unnecessarily made them boil through so many ceremonies. All snow white with black spots.”
Two women lay beside one another, intertwined in a bed of eroticism and femininity- shamelessly themselves. Stars and flowers and eyes surround their stripped figures. Beautifully bare, your fresh face prepares for its own mosaic of makeup. What picture will you paint? What stories will you tell?
In ragamalas, rarely is any skin tone other than light skin illustrated on deities and characters from folk tales. In art, the nature in which the human body is represented can be overwhelming. Nevertheless, far from static, every culture’s standard of beauty oscillates differently as hierarchies form, crumble, and reconstruct.
“We need to take a page from Frida’s book and learn to accept every hairy inch of our beautiful skin.
We need to rebrand the industry’s definition of “natural” beauty.”