Cellar Doors

by Noah Phillips

Cellar door. Beautiful, isn't it? The phrase, I mean. Someone once said that, if you don't take the meaning into account, the phrase "cellar door" is the most beautiful phrase. I completely concur. I've always been interested in beauty, some say obsessed, but that's mostly just this one group. Anyway, the first time I heard the news about the aforementioned collection of letters I was shocked, nearly outraged, that any one specific phrase could be any more beautiful than any other. I started thinking about what beauty really means, why it's important, and what on earth could make something the most beautiful.

A saying comes to mind when recounting these events, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." When I was a child I would think, "There is no way that the beholder's eye is that beautiful." My mother would call me a smart-ass. I would call me confused. Then she was taken from me, and I no longer had anyone to tell me where beauty was, I had to find it on my own.

After years of searching, I found her. She was my beholder and her eyes were gorgeous. Together we went everywhere, and captured every beautiful moment. We forged our own beauty and no one had to agree or disagree. We knew what it was.

Our first beauty was five when he faded. It crushed her completely. She beheld a different world, a dark world, and her gorgeous eyes faded and refused to return to me. And so she left, in a hideously similar way to our first beauty.

I created a second beauty with her though, before she left. And this new beauty didn't fade until she was thirteen, I was heartbroken to see her leave. She had the eyes of my beholder.

And as I sit here, blood smeared across my face and knife in hand, making it fade for the fifth time in my life, I think to myself "Why must I always hide these sanguine moments behind my cellar door?"


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