Upon Learning That the Korean Word for Beautiful Means “To Be Like Oneself,” by Alexis Lee

I once thought the magic

lived in Rapunzel’s golden blonde hair.

Not in its cascade,

but the color.

Why else would it fade

when cut? So, I chased that gold,

bleached my silky black hair—

the exact shade of my mother’s,

her mother’s—

until it shriveled into

ashy, burnt marshmallow stick.

Dead grass.

Thick mascara, thicker eyeliner—
Sketching shapes I leased from someone else’s face,

shapes I didn’t, couldn’t, have.

My eyelids, like half-peeled mandarins,

cloaked my dreams.

Short skirts, tank top, and tan lines, I smothered

Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil onto my skin, which once wore

SPF 50+ sunscreen, because porcelain-white skin, the kind that never saw the Sun,

was the Korean ideal. Here—

in America—I

melted and burned

to glow like the Sun.

When Rapunzel’s hair was cut short

it lost its magic and turned brown.

Because the magic was in the gold, right?

But when mine turned gold, nothing

healed. No tower

fell. No prince

came. Only the memory of my mom’s hands

tracing my hair. Soothing strands that snag,

brushing the wince away. The zigzag part

drawn, disheveled, redrawn

until I said yes.

In the mirror we looked

the same: Noses

worn to a stub like a charmed charcoal, eyes

pooling ancient water in deepest cisterns, lips

dainty and delicate as a cursed cherry. My face

re-surfaced from a long dive.

I can’t travel back in time.

I do my own hair now.

I let my black roots

push through the blonde.

I stopped borrowing and

returned:

the tanned glamour I chased on a foreign shore,

the face I drew on every morning and washed off every night,

the “White” ways that felt like a key

to belonging. I drained them all out

like dirty bathwater, cloudy with someone else’s skin.

I refilled the tub.

This time the water ran clear

around me.