Our making of ourselves is set apart,

Distinct, authentic, holding worlds within.

Created each in difference, not the same,

To guard the vast originality of life.

And yet, we humans fashion random words,

To mark another as unlike ourselves.

We craft a gaze that names them “different,”

As if that means they stand outside the whole.

But when I call us “ethereal,” I mean

Not beauty’s mask, or perfect, shallow form—

But something finer, delicate, and light,

The presence that we carry into rooms.

And this is what I grieve within my chest:

A world that judges faces, frames, and skin,

While never seeing what the spirit brings—

The hidden sparks that open up the dark.

For difference is a brilliance of its own,

A miracle, a sign of God’s design.

If you look closely, people are like art:

Expressions, laughter, talents, fleeting dreams.

We break, we mend, then break, and mend again.

Yet still, the beauty lingers through it all,

Alive in every fragile, fractured frame,

In other worlds, or in another life.

And me, with all my insecurities,

Still wrote these words, a proof of inner power.

So yes—we all are rare, and luminous,

We all are, still, authentically ethereal.