rambling: reeking with beauty

one of my friends told me in a moment of utter sincerity that i 'reek with beauty'. i started laughing because 'reek' clearly has negative connotations and i know that is not what she meant. after some advice from our human thesaurus she changed it to 'exude' but the original phrasing was absolutely brilliant. her compliment to me continued, but that stayed with me. its crazy when someone tells you something true about yourself, especially when you kinda thought of it yourself. i know my mind well enough to know that it betrays me and will lie to me, especially when i am the subject, so hearing it from someone else makes it seem more true.

so i reek with beauty huh? clearly a positive thing and though i do truly try to maintain positivity, i have learned that i can go either way to equal measure. so if i am reeking with beauty, busting at the seams as it were, with light, there is an equal amount of darkness. virtue counterbalanced with vice. perfectly imperfect.

i flirt with it, those imperfect dark aspects of myself. there is something interesting about those things to me. they make me human, and make me relate to people. i connect more over idiosyncrasy than normality.

but how do you control the negative, the reeking, to maintain the positive?
is there a balance between the two because the darkness can feel so good at times?

the phrase 'reeking with beauty' brings them together in language so i need to figure out how to bring that into action. but maybe, without her even knowing it, she was telling me that i already do that. because the true difficulty of it all is trying not to let the darkness overcome because that is all it seeks to do. and it does feel quite amazing at times to let it. but the light is always better, more true and surely less harmful. the light is without shame. so i guess through all this jumbled language i am seeking to find my dusk, or dawn depending on perspective. i know people count on me to be things and i put pressure upon myself to be it, but truly i think what i am getting from these past couple of days, is that i am it.

in all my reeking, the beauty of who i am comes through.

moral: get in tune with the beauty within you, no one can define it for you, but they surely will recognize it and even better they will appreciate it. but it must be true to you, it can never be fabricated. and believe me, we all have it, in various levels and forms, but it is there, you just gotta let it out.