She doesn't know how beautiful she is.

She is just so extraordinarily beautiful. Not sexually, not to me, but as a friend, and overall, as a person, inside and out. She has these bright, shining blue eyes that crinkle in the corners, where premature crows' feet are starting to claw their way outward, just as on the rest of us, whenever she smiles. She has happy eyes. The kind of eyes that you want to look into, to see into, to see what she's thinking and to approve of you rather than look down upon you. Those same eyes that become a bloodshot red when she cries, though they're still shining and beautiful.

She doesn't know how beautiful she is.

She has rosy pink, candy-apple cheeks, rounded with health and reddened radiantly with life, whether she is smiling or tear-stained. Pale porcelain, milky virgin-like skin, clear of blemishes and boldened a creamy peach or shaded a tint of red by the sun, cold, or just some slight embarrassment or laughter.

She doesn't know how beautiful she is.

Her hair is curly, bouncy, a happy voluminous blonde, pieces and strands of every color, thick and scraggly, yet beautifully so. It's shiny, healthy, dark at the roots and very light at the tips. The colors of straw and golden rod and mellow sun and bleach or beach and silvery gold, all intertwined with bits of brown with very, very slight tints of a soft hue of red.

She doesn't know how beautiful she is.

A laugh that makes just about anyone smile, an infectious happiness or sadness to whomever is around her, what she feels somehow projecting clearly in her crystal blue eyes, as the emotions are conveyed just as gracefully or gratingly in the expressions on her doll-like face.

She doesn't know how beautiful she is, but I do. And I know that someday she'll find someone that will find her even more eccentrically beautiful, and will have the strength to tell her so. But for now, she'll think the slight curve of her stomach is fat, though really, it's just a curve of true womanhood, and like the rest of any sorts of curves that will keep developing, I hope she finds acceptance in herself and of her body.

Because she is beautiful.