I watch it again and again and stare at my own beauty, which leaps off the screen at me, delayed ten years. My jawline. My eyes. My hair. I find myself coveting myself. And then I remind myself, I will covet this self too. This trip. This freedom. This joy. This movement and this skin I have now, even if parts are less vibrant than they were, they are more so now than they will be. I know, too, that what the person in that video did not have was a sense of self. A belief in herself. A seriousness in life. Do I have it now? Do we ever fully have it?
