The first time I fell in love it was with a pair of blue eyes and a wide dimpled grin.

“Your old man loves ya, Danny girl,” He whispered. “You never ever forget that, yeah?”

I never did. And I never thought I could ever love any man as much as I loved my father. But as we grow, we change, we begin to make our own decisions and thus become independent and self sufficient and start turning away from our parents and turning to others. We form friendships, strong bonds and ties and begin experiencing life outside of the bubble we grew up inside of.

And we fall in love…a second time.

The second time I fell in love it was with a badly scarred face, the stuff of nightmares; the sort of disfigurement that mothers steer their children away from. Ugly, jagged slashes marred the skin from the top of his skull, down over his right eye, an eye that had been dug out of his face with a serrated blade. The scars continued across his cheek, over his lips and down his neck, ending at the top of his shoulder. His chest was a hundred times worse; scar tissue as far as the eye could see.

“Baby,” He said gruffly, “Man like me got no business with a girl like you. You’re nothin’ but fuckin’ beauty and I’m a whole lot of fuckin’ ugly who’s already halfway to hell.”

But he was wrong.

Everything has beauty. Even the ugly. Especially the ugly.

Because without ugly there would be no beauty.

Because without beauty we would not survive our pain, our sorrow, and our suffering.

And in the world I lived in, the world he lived in, a secret world within the world, a world of of constant crime and cruel, cold, death, there was almost nothing but suffering.

“You may not be beautiful the way you were before,” I whispered, placing my hand on his hard chest. “But you’re still beautiful. To me.