The Beautiful No

When you cut off at the pass your tendency to judge and compare, suddenly everyone else’s beauty is a reflection of yours

Then you look at the photograph and you see that, in fact, you weren’t any of those things. In fact, you would love to be that girl right now—inhabiting that body with that skin, with those eyes, with that smile, now

They were golden. The most shocking thing of all was the behavior of the grown-ups, who acted like they were under some sort of hypnotic spell. They treated the “prettiests” more like colleagues than children. The “prettiests” were usually further along on the physical development scale (read: bodies more like women), and I guess that made them seem older