On the edge of a small coastal town, there was a bench that faced the sea. Every morning, an older woman named Elia sat there with a thermos of tea and a notebook she rarely opened.
People often passed her on their way to work. They assumed she came for the sunrise—the way the sky spilled orange and pink over the horizon. Tourists lifted their phones to capture it. “Beautiful,” they whispered, as if the word were fragile.
One morning, a boy named Tomas sat beside her. He had a bruise on his cheek and anger in his eyes.
“Everyone says the sunrise is beautiful,” he muttered. “But it’s just the sun. It does this every day.”
Elia smiled. “You’re right,” she said. “It does.”
He frowned. “Then why do people care?”
Elia poured a little tea into the lid and handed it to him. “Because it doesn’t try to impress anyone. It simply shows up and burns, even after the darkest night.”
The boy stared at the horizon. The waves were restless, the clouds uneven. Nothing about it was perfect.
“My mother says I should be more handsome,” he said quietly. “Better at things. Like my brother.”
Elia nodded, as though she had been waiting for this. “Beauty isn’t about better,” she said. “It’s about true. The sea is beautiful because it is entirely itself—wild, loud, calm, changing. You are beautiful for the same reason.”
The sun lifted higher. The colors softened into blue.
Tomas studied his reflection in the thermos lid. The bruise was still there. His hair was still unruly.
But the light caught in his eyes differently now.
For the first time, he did not search for perfection.
He sat, breathing, as the world turned gold around him—and understood that beauty was not something to become.
It was something to be.
and then 