Angelically soft skin, delicate curls on the nape of a neck, rose petals pressed between the pages of a book from a long lost Valentine’s. Aristotle said that “A beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude... for beauty depends on magnitude and order”.

Order I refute; magnitude I do not. A beauty rooted in order is something fragile, prone to hairline cracks or shattered when dropped. It makes you sigh with pleasure but it is ephemeral and fleeting, quickly lost from your mind as the ripples of a rock throw to disrupt it disarrange the composition.

Beauty as a weapon; a beauty that transcends the tamed and ordained, slipping through hemispheres and stratospheres to alchemise itself into something as comforting as it is disturbing, perverse as it is alluring. A beauty that draws you down into its depth, enchants you like a spell and then stabs you in the gut and turns itself into your organs as you bleed out, moaning with pleasure. The beauty of the savage natural world, the fearsome inescapability of fear and rage, of the animalic lust and terrifying love of what we cannot see but is known underneath the sublime. A true beauty interwoven in the pulse of the divine; the blood that courses through veins, dilates pupils and pumps our hearts.

A beauty to protect me, a beauty to bind me. Tie my wrists and drip into my throat, a memory that makes the hairs on my arms stand on end, that changed me and stayed with me. The black kohl that shaped my eyes, mascara streaming down my cheeks. Red lipstick mingled with the blood of a bitten lip, the scent of a first lover haunting like a spectre stroking my skin. Gilded and oiled, glimmering and brandished. A beauty that slices through temporarily; beauty as a weapon.