"How am I pretty?"

How are you not?

A list feels hardly kind, nor overly sensical, so here 

Here are moments

Moments I have littered through my memories, and I now reach for them only to find

 there are too many, a child under the burning sun, surrounded by beautiful sea shells

who cannot hold them all

But there's going to be too many regardless, so, here;

Here are my paperclippings of you 

Moments when you reach and snag a little of the life of the sun for your own, gossamer thread of glowing light down to earth, brilliance, a sunbeam, a smile and a person 

Moments like when you're asleep on my pillow at 2 am and your hair's a cloud and you

finger's moving tiny fractions in your sleep,

moments when the world seems to pause for you, because you're the loveliest thing in this city right then, with streetlight haze and yellow glow in the window above, and quiet warmth down here, safe and quiet, away from the flows of time

Moments like when you pause and look back, and your expression shifts, crisp lines around your smile melting to something softer, quiet shade-summer-warmth to

whomever you're talking to, a sun warmed breeze and convection pattern in a column,

in a person

you're dancing and alive, so alive that the room feels electric for a second, beaming and songbeats melded to skin and past bones, to homes and pasts, and a heart copper-gold and true, blazing though a night etched in silver ice 

There is a whisper in the sky of stars we cannot know and never see, but you're light

and glowing and maybe we're whole right now and maybe we don't always have to

yearn for stars 

Maybe one made human is enough 

You're beautiful in all the stop-gap moments in all your honey-warmth and sea salt tides 

in a deep bell toll heartbeat like a song 

You're beautiful in the way of currents and tides and song rhythms

 overflow and undertow and all the lines that don't match