My body is beautiful, exactly the way it is.

Beauty in bodies gets assessed against a standard almost nothing else alive is held to. A heron is never found insufficiently symmetrical.

Yours is a working thing before it is a viewed thing. It carried the shopping in. It held someone recently. It will do a thousand unnoticed jobs before tonight without asking for an opinion.

The hard part is the timing. Not once the last stretch is lost, not after the summer — now, in the light of this particular Tuesday. A large ask on a bad day, and still the only body available to live in.