An Existential Guide to: Living the Beautiful Life
The morning I decide to live beautifully, something dies in my sink.
Something light for the weekend: enjoy :)
The morning I decide to live beautifully, something dies in my sink. I don’t know what. A small shrimp of the soul, maybe; a pale crustacean of intention that crawled up from the copper pipes to see if I meant it. The water runs eucalyptus; the candles are French; the mirror has already forgiven me. I push the dead thing around with a biodegradable bamboo brush and think: behold, wellness. Behold, the sacrament of lemon water. Behold, a life wreathed in steam and algorithm.
Outside, the city has the peeled look of a citrus, pith exposed, everything a little raw around the edges. A delivery van breathes warm diesel into the morning like a minor deity trying not to be worshipped. I’m supposed to stretch and hydrate and journal and... Instead I inventory the day’s probable humiliations and feel strangely fed. Beauty requires a substrate; the Greeks used marble, we have shame. The difference is mostly acoustic. But I can forget.
I towel my hands and go sit on a bench to see what happens when nothing happens. At first, I’m itchy in the brain. The pavement glitters with last night’s crushed glass; pigeons convene like fallen bureaucrats; a dog misreads a leaf with the religious fervor of a monk. Boredom, I realize, is not the absence of stimuli but the presence of time, uncut. If I can let a minute pass through me without trying to improve it, the minute becomes interesting on its own, like a shy child that will only speak when you stop asking questions. A bus arrives breathing like a cow; I do not board; I will not; a small victory. A woman asks me the time and I tell her, and for two seconds we co own the hour. It feels like smuggling.
I start making covenants with places. Not the postcard landmarks, the ones that smell of bleach and rain, the ones with the coppery rumor of ambulances - just the habitual corners, the underachieving alley that always smells faintly of fish, the bridge whose concrete belly I touch at dawn like an old relic. A city is not something you “use.” You marry it and then learn its pet names: the lamppost that supported you when drunk, the storm drain that kept your secret, the shopkeeper who slipped you a sentence you didn’t deserve. I leave a penny on the same bollard every Tuesday. I don’t know who takes it; I prefer to imagine it’s the city tipping itself.
Inside, I try to tune my home to human scale. The phone sulks in another room, and I boil water loudly, as if performing heat for an audience. I open a book and do not take a hostage from it; I let the paragraphs go where they will. Some nights I memorize a stanza. To carry a melody by heart is to own a small, weatherproof chapel. In stairwells and bathrooms the chapel opens; the acoustics forgive your voice and you forgive your life for not being the kind where people burst into song. I hum my poem anyway and let the day resettle.
I have learned that awe is allergic to efficiency. So I declare a sabbath - not religious, just useless. You know, a day with no profit motive in it. I walk until I find water and watch it practicing the same gesture over and over, perfecting nothing. I read a single paragraph so slowly it ferments. I let a friend bore me without trying to fix them, as if boredom were simply a sign we’re close enough to be uninteresting. The world does not reward this behavior. I do it anyway. Beauty is a bad employee.
