Ineluctable Beauty

This is when something grabs you by the gut and flushes your brain clean of chatter and you feel a little queazy, helpless, like your going to cry. You want to hug, kiss, or destroy, immediately, whatever it is that has seized you. This feeling can get confused with any number of feelings, like pity: when you're in 5th grade watching the 4th grade class perform Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat--the boys' faces are caked with stage-makeup, their sullen smirks distancing their selves from their characters--they watch each others' feet and bump shoulders as the music pulls them through an over-rehearsed yet still shoddily executed choreography. There, in that world, the year of 1998, in the cradle of that school auditorium, in that play, that song and dance number (Go Go Go, Joseph), in those uncoordinated shuffles and garishly painted faces, you would have experienced this thing called ineluctable beauty; a stab, a flash of the whole spectrum of experience: the pain, pleasure, injustice, serendipity, and forgetfulness we and the world cause each other, reified, exploding on stage, a frustrated paroxysm of teen-insecurity, an insidious rebellion to the circus of life that awaited you and every other student in that room.  You might not have been (or never be) able to put words to that emotion, to that experience, as you would have been thrown between other, more familiar, all-too-simplistic and misleading words that would miss the mark entirely, so you land on pity, and, surprisingly, do your best to conceal a tear that comes more from a place of confusion and exaltation than sadness.