Timeless (#BeautyandtheBeast)

Timeless

She had never felt beautiful.

You could search the world and not find one person who has not looked in the mirror and wished they could change the person staring back at them, and you certainly would not find such a person at Foxhole Drive. Rose Bracken was named after her grandmother, born in 1930, and no stranger to that incredibly indescribable sinking feeling of seeing an unwanted reflection.

She first felt it when she was eight years old, and the first Disney princess graced the screens of America. Snow White had perfectly crimson lips and skin the colour of alabaster, her hair shined like raven's feathers and her cheeks carried a permanent flush. Rose, in comparison, had hair the colour of a fallen leaf in autumn, and her skin was dappled in freckles that felt, to her, like paint splattered on an already flawed canvas. It was not the princess, but the society that  twisted her until young girls were convinced that she was the one and only ideal. In 1939, her mother made her a dress of yellow and blue, and Rose spent hour upon hour twirling in the gown, watching the fabric flare out as she hummed and pushed her raven hair from her rosy cheeks. But when she caught a glance of herself in the mirror, her hair was not ebony and sleek, but auburn and ratty, and what she had imagined to be delicately flushed cheeks were blotches of red blaring out from beneath a hive of freckles. She told herself she would be beautiful when she was older.

A year after the war ended, Rose was sixteen and a picture of skin and bone; underfed as the world recovered from rationing. Her waist was tiny, yes, just like the tabloids told her it should be, but the skin on her hips clung to the bones and the 'necessary' curves of a young woman had long since vanished. Rose would think back to the days when she would stare in the mirror and beg for the fat to roll off her, beg for her stomach to be flatter and her arms to be thinner, and she would laugh at the girl who did not know her own mind. Little did she know, sixteen-year-old Rose only knew the mind that society had moulded for her, the one that had been constructed and constricted until it conformed to the one and only ideal that the world was capable of believing in. Beauty was what society deemed it to be, and as they idolised women like Marilyn Monroe, Rose looked to her own body and questioned why nature had made her this way. Why did her body not curve in and out in perfectly smooth waves? Why did her bones jut out from her skin as if it were paper, as if all that filled her was a skeleton and nothing else? Rose told herself that she would be beautiful when she was older.

Ten years later; Rose was older. The children she had had had marked her stomach with lines she called grotesque, but her husband insisted were part of nature's beauty, and her youthful skin had lost its glow as she slowly moved into her thirties. The skin and bone was gone, but now the curves were in the wrong places. The freckles had faded, but now her skin began to show the signs of ageing. With every problem that was fixed, another seemed to arise, and Rose spent her time with her nose in a magazine as her children played, gazing longingly at the bodies and the faces she would never come close to. She told herself that she would simply never be beautiful.

In 2017, Rose is eighty-seven, her skin is haggard and her hair turned grey years ago. Wrinkles lie heavily on her face and the ageing signs she feared so much have taken over her very being.

Every morning, Rose looks in the mirror. She looks over the lines on her face and sees laughter lines from days her smile could not be tempered, and frown lines from days spent fretting for the people she has come to love. Each crease tells a story, a story of a thousand words and a million memories that no-one will ever be able to quite understand like Rose does. Her lips are thin and far from the crimson of Snow White, but through them has passed every word she has ever uttered, every "I love you" she has ever built up the bravery to say.

Rose had taught herself to trust society more than herself. Throughout her life, she had been told what beauty was. That word had always been defined for her. Beauty had become a social construct formed to persecute the minority; it changed by the decade and by the newest face gracing the media. Now, old, haggard, forgotten by all but those that love her, Rose has finally realised that she defines her own beauty.

And when she looks in her eyes she sees the eight-year-old that spun in that yellow dress. She sees the eyes she had had when she was a teenager, she sees that spark that she has carried with her through her long life, the spark that she refused to let anyone put out. She had stopped searching for beauty. For, amidst her struggle to find it, her father had been killed in the war, the first man she loved had broken her heart, her youngest daughter had left home, and her husband had left her a widow. That is living: heartbreak and laughter and everything in-between. It was when she finally gave up searching for beauty that she found it.

That is what she sees when she looks in those aged eyes: the mother, the wife, the daughter, the randmother, the friend, and the little girl who just wanted to dance in a princess dress. She sees a life that has been lived.

And that kind of beauty is timeless.