My darling girl,

Please keep your beauty and his idea of your beauty in different cupboards, different drawers
Damn it, different houses
Do not keep them in the same box
Maybe not even under the same roof

A lot of men love one thing more than beautiful women
A beautiful woman they haven’t seen before
A more distant beauty

If you start searching through those cupboards and drawers and your ideas of beauty are too close to each other
starting to intertwine
heaven forbid they are in bed together
separate them immediately
ban them to opposite corners
a stern time-out

If you don’t,
then you will have lost something
without even realising it
and that is the most painful loss of all

Your beauty will, from then on, need his eyes to see it
and you will have lost something
you will have lost the ability to see yourself
in all your familiar feminine fascination
in all your exquisite forms and moods and shapes

you won’t be able to remember that your olive skin is the softest unless His hands are touching it
or that your breasts are plump and supple even if He had never or never again were to notice them
or that your mocha eyes are sparkly when you’re in the throws of your unique, melodic and sometimes cackled laughter

you will have forgotten that you smell sweet in the mornings and like red wine in the evenings and that the red dress that makes you feel like a Spanish Senorita makes you look just as beautiful as one

You will no longer be able to notice the eyes of every person in a room who turn to watch you because perhaps He no longer does

all the while never becoming any less beautiful
never less heavenly
never less new
more beautiful in fact
for having loved
and stronger still for now knowing where your beauty must be kept

close to your chest

and behind your eyes

and belonging just to you

only to be generously shared but never given away.