beautiful!

“There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don't know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history.”
 Amy Reed, Beautiful 

a poem John found and thought that I would like !

Walking the Bog Road It came to her that happiness would feel like a lark rising from the pit of her stomach to her head to explode in a song only she would recognise. That her heart was a walled garden tended by gardeners called Prudence, Constance and Faith, but her life bore a closer resemblance to a hilltop bog and the people in it, eggs laid by song-birds on the ground, invisible to the human eye yet utterly exposed. That relationships were all about picking steps across that bog without disturbing any nests, and the possibility of joy somehow hung on an intimacy with frailty only known in wildness; like the lark’s eggs, it was something that could not be grasped, something perpetually to be hatched.