When I was a teenager, one of my friends told me that if I ever knew how beautiful I was, I would ruin it. She was actually my best friend, and I’d pretend not to recognize her years later when she came into the coffee shop where I worked. Lately I have been nostalgic for my youth- the feeling of being led through a dark carpeted home to the attic or the basement, quietly, not wanting to wake up the adults in the home, bumping into a table. The specific familiarity of a track or soccer field I’d competed on once a year since 7th grade. Terrible friends telling me I’m beautiful.

Am I just feeling nostalgic for the past? Or is being older worse and better than being younger? 

But the worst part about getting older, I think, is the waning of beauty in your life. Does it actually go away? Is it harder to find? Have standards changed? Do we feel less beautiful? Are we bored? 

But I don’t know if I ever felt beautiful. Rather, when I look back at pictures of myself, I can see that I may have been- but only then. Never now. Maybe I’m staying faithful to that friend- I don’t want to ruin beauty by knowing about it. And I am constantly engaged in something boring; I do find beauty in my phone sometimes. It keeps me coming back, unfortunately.

I try, when I see beauty, to point it out to my son. Recently he said, I love when you tell me something’s beautiful. And I responded, That’s something I try to do, appreciate beautiful things. Like mama, he said. You’re beautiful mama, he said, and I vowed never to forget that moment.

So beauty’s not impossible to find. But it is hard to make. Technically I made that moment, making him. 

And maybe that’s what I’ve been concerned with- my belief that I haven’t made anything else but him that’s beautiful. Nothing satisfies me, convinces me, has ever been enough, then or now. I know not all art needs to be beautiful, but I am in a phase where I want mine to be. So this issue of The Triangle House Review became The Beauty Issue. 

Our fiction roundtable concerns itself with beauty in fiction, with luminaries Kyle Lucia Wu, Claire Luchette, Garielle Lutz, Isabelle Kaplan, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, and Alyssa Songsiridej. And we have fiction by Chelsea Hodson and Grace Byron. Rounding out our foray into beauty and fiction and authors talking about it, we have a meta interview between Charlie Markbreiter and Maz Murray.

In non-fiction, Anya Lewis-Meeks is writing about On Beauty, both the book and the idea, and Liana Mack is holding a critical mirror to the Beauty and Beast trope. We have Lauren Lavín on eyes, skin, and pageantry and Agata Tumiłowicz-Mazar’s essay on war and gardens. 

We are featuring poets Mira Gonzalez and Miaoye Que- I never fail to find poetry beautiful, Que’s work is no exception. And the title of Mira’s book, I Will Never Be Beautiful Enough to Make us Beautiful Together, has been rattling around my head for almost ten years. 

Maybe poets are the only ones who can prove unmitigated beauty in the past?

Last but not least, the up-close floral stills, this issue’s visuals, are by Jurate Veceraite.

One thing about getting older, is you can still try new things. Another is, you can pursue beauty intentionally, and you can do it any way you want. I’ve recently started taking ceramics classes. I love it because every piece I make feels like it exists against the odds, and I’ve felt the same way about the Triangle House Review since it was founded in 2017. When I wedge a piece of clay, put it on the wheel, throw it, let it dry, trim it, fire it, glaze it, and then fire it again, after all that work and waiting, I end up with something lopsided and sometimes, ruined. Touching the clay was beautiful though, and so is the fact that I wanted to make something, and then I did. 

Now I have empty, imperfect vessels sitting around my house, a visible progression.

We’re coming up on five years of our magazine existing, and this is our 29th issue. So the next issue’s theme is going to be The Past — to celebrate our fifth anniversary. Time feels both meaningless and full of meaning, looping and triggering, or even, fake. It feels fun to play with, or it can feel like a trap. 

Does performing beauty actually ruin it? My high school best friend might think so, or maybe she thinks it would only ruin mine. But The Beauty Issue exists because I’m literal minded, and I wanted to read and share and be there at the genesis of some beauty. In some way, I wanted to prove to myself that the world can still be beautiful.