I don’t think I look like any of these things. I’m in my twenties, unmarried, child-less, and human. I try to imagine more things that can be both human and beautiful to see where I fit in. I come up with the same answers that other people do—cubic zirconia, the telephone, Rome’s Church of Santa Maria della Concezione, Jim Morrison lyrics—I touched her thigh and death smiled. You likely place me somewhere between nineties rom-coms and dark blue. Funny and simple and night-like. You don’t know me very well.

I do this often—take myself out of my body and look from a bird's eye view. What made you say that? Was it the way my elbow digs into the edge of the table, my hand resting under my chin? Is it the eye contact? The fact that my legs keep crossing and uncrossing? Are the jokes landing? I don’t know and I’m too bashful to ask so I simply thank you instead, but in the back of my mind the curiosity sits still like a well-lit houseplant, waxy warm and too comfortable to move.

I imagine that beauty lies in something like that, something comfortable, so I think about cozy things that make my stomach float and I come up with the same answers that other people do—knitted mittens, the perfect birthday gift, coming home to a clean carpet, Kafka’s handwritten love letters—I want in fact more of you, how this past weekend my friends and I decorated our Christmas tree, plopping wrongly tied baubles along plastic pine needles, tacky garland strung in zig-zags, each of our fingers coming together to place the top-heavy star. We took videos as makeshift holiday greeting cards with no one to send them to, the living room dusted in gold. I think about how we moved around each other without having to say “excuse me.”

I consider telling you about this recent experience but I decide not to—instead I ask what your favorite color is and you answer “purple.” I say the color purple makes me think of betta fish, red onion and Van Gogh’s Irises. You laugh. I tell you about how I saw the painting at the MET for the first time last spring, about how I waltzed through artworks scanning for the specific canvas, about how I felt like I proved something by finally being able to see it myself. Vincent was there, hidden within strokes of lilac and stringy leaves. Up close, he felt all the more tangible. I could imagine his stained fingertips, his unkempt hair, his painter posture. A man making purpose out of pain—I thought that meant I could, too. I tell you that in high school I had written a mediocre poem about the flowers, Vincent’s time in Saint-Rémy, his brother Theo and his plans to buy paint—it is looking at things for a long time that ripens you. You’re staring at me again with a curl at the edge of your mouth, and I imagine Orpheus, his inability to look anywhere else. I hope that you find me lovely enough to turn to dust. I tell you that you have a nice smile, and you show more teeth.

What I don’t tell you is that my favorite color is yellow—purple’s polar opposite. I don’t talk about how during that trip to the museum I fell in love with another painting far more than Van Gogh’s. While you sip your chai my mind wanders to Rousseau’s Sunset Near Arbonne and I think about you calling me beautiful, how much I want to hear you say it again. You reach across the table and trace the back of my hand. I picture the blackened tree, hung up amidst glowing light. I am not anyone’s muse but I hope to be yours. I think about clouds the shade of Achilles’ ripped hair, about the ominous dark underneath a sky of fire. Give me a beauty like that—one that shows but doesn’t tell. A landscape that exists because you’re looking. A tree that will fall when you are there to hear it.