The beauty comes, in part, from you. Don't you know that you are beautiful? Dear, if ever you feel my eyes upon you, please know that it is due to that, your indescribable breath-takingness. I will never know if you yourself consider your reflection beautiful- but I can assure you that it is. How could it not be?
It is not just how you look, either. It is everything else- the things I picked up on in our first, our only, encounter; the way you hold yourself, the grace in all that you do. You are living, breathing proof that beauty can be apparent with little knowledge.
The other part of the beauty is harder to explain. It comes from knowing you are around, knowing I am lucky enough to know you, in the most skeletal of forms. You are powerful, and infectious- I need to work harder, do more, be better. Maybe then, one day, I will be almost nearly deserving of you. That thought is a beautiful thing.
Then there is the pain. The realisation that this is likely to be all that I get, glimpses like the smell of blossom in spring, never there for long enough. I am no longer naïve enough to kid myself that anything more will transpire. we are worlds away, and we have no reason to collide. Orbits do not function that way.
Another painful truth is the knowledge that, one day, you will be gone, without warning. I have been in this situation before. This time I will claim I am prepared, but this is not something I can prepare for, and I know that, deep down. I will still miss you terribly, will still spend time waiting for fate to hand me a lifeline. I will not consider all the times I have had that chance already, and see that as my share of the luck. I will just look at each time the odds were defeated, and remind myself it can happen. It can happen.
Why else is there pain? Well, beauty is related to touching something deep inside, and that can be painful. You are exquisite to a point where it is all but unbearable- that is painful. Furthermore, I must face facts: I will never be good enough, not for you, not for anyone like you.
And yet, somehow, I got lucky, because you are still here. There are so many people who will never meet you, even peripherally, like me. They are unfortunate. I got to see you; I got to live with you amongst the crowd. I got to feel the beautiful pain and the painful beauty, and that is more than most.