on_a_scale_of_one_to_ten ovenbird Her husband, she says, seems to have a rating system of desirability. The criteria are vague. He figures he’s about a seven on this opaque scale and so he aimed to marry someone who was also a seven. Which she supposes means that she was a seven at some point in the past. But she worries. Because men are still deemed attractive as they age, (they get to be distinguished) while women are held to an unreasonable standard of perpetual youth and are not given grace to age naturally. She says she feels like a depreciating asset. What will happen when he’s still a seven and she’s a five, or a four? And why, she wonders, are we assigning people numbers anyway? Like they’re cattle at a county fair? She would never give someone she loves a number. Their value is in who they are and how they make her feel and the beauty of the space that is defined when two souls meet and know each other. She couldn’t put a number on that. And she wonders what lack made her a seven in the first place. In school a seventy percent would have felt like a failure, and here she is, a seven out of ten at her peak, and slipping every day. Isn’t wisdom worth something? Isn’t the accrued story of her life, now etched into her face, worth something? She looks at the back of her hands, beginning to darken with age spots. These hands are just hers, she thinks. Not better or worse than anyone else’s. Just the hands that have lived and worked and held her children and acted as a vessel for tears and touched the faces of lovers that have come and gone and brought her here to belong to this man, who thinks these hands are a seven at best. It’s not meant to be an insult. Seven is pretty good, after all, and he doesn’t see himself as any better. But she doesn’t want to be reduced to this, to a number, when her heart is so unquantifiable, vast, and still expanding, flying outward from her chest until it disperses and is subsumed by everything that is. 260505 what's it to you? who go blather from