You may start, as you do with many things, by making a list.

Item One: Locate the world’s most beautiful woman.

Item One-A: If you cannot locate the world’s most beautiful woman, look harder. A woman of this sort is likely elusive. You may have missed her.

Item One-B: Abandon hope. This is normal.

They say it is when you stop searching that you find what you are looking for. This is not to be believed. Searches are commonly misguided in the first place; surveillance teams scour the landscape for clues leading to the right answer to a wrong question. The world was many shapes before it was discovered round. Fantasy treasure fools many into leading entire lives devoted to its unearthing. A series of beating hearts, wasted on prospect.

The best discoveries are accidental. Atoms bouncing around in space, colliding to share valence electrons, forming the molecular bonds that comprise our most elemental parts. These are unplanned acts. They are that first expression of passion—how your probing tongue slowed to glance the lower lip of your lover, that quiver of submission in her parted jaw, etcetera—when you discovered it was not How far will she go? but How long can this last?. Discovery as invention. As chance cooperation. Your discovery will not be the answer you were looking for, but the question you never realized was there.

No search for the world’s most beautiful woman ends successfully. She will evade your exploration and undermine your expectations. The world’s most beautiful woman is a reaper of cruelty, the disapproving nod of a joke misunderstood, the scathing reward of finger to frying pan. Lust after her and end up lonely. Cup her water in your hands and watch it seep through your fingers. Disappointment is her remuneration.

The woman you find will not be the world’s most beautiful woman.

No.

The woman you will find will not be from this world at all. She will be alien. Her hair will not be comprised of keratin and dead skin cells, but of a carefully woven agenda of silken gravity, and it will slip through your fingers as an afternoon of chores slips a lover’s mind. Her brain lies not under a membrane of neurons, but beneath a mantle of speckled stardust, flecks of radiance tufted into a dense winding staircase of raw awe. And her face. Her face will not be a soft tissue envelope over a skull, but a landing pad for an endless line of besitos on a cool summer night.

The woman you will find puts the world’s most beautiful woman to shame. That is why, during your search, you could not find the world’s most beautiful woman. She was hiding, afraid of being exposed for what she is. Terrestrial, grounded. Common. A reproduced masterpiece of threadbare thoughts and consignment dreams. The world’s most beautiful woman is an orchestrated likeness of the planet around her. She is flesh wound together with a few quick orbits, then unraveled in eternal revolution. The world’s most beautiful woman is fleeting.

The woman you will find remains still as the world spins. It is her magnitude which fashions the spin. It is the world who orbits her. Your urges in her presence might betray your better judgment. You are too dizzy, a drunken fool with your heels in the air. You may have the urge to categorize this woman, to title her in some show of recognition for her supernaturalness. This is inadvisable. Great art cannot be summarized any more than great beauty can be explained. (The woman you will find is both.) She boasts undocumented detail in more cavernous array than the inscriptions of Chauvet, with more perseverance than the winds that tickle the enduring motif of Matterhorn.

To call this woman beautiful would be lazy. She is fortitude, she is kindness. She is the raw personage of prodigy, the yielding shelter of maternity. She is the hazardous boundary of the castle moat and the glowing innocence silhouetting the curtains of the Princess Suite. Try to rescue her and she’ll snap at you. Attack her and she’ll pirouette in polite dismissal. But study her long enough, attend to her mannerisms—how the crescent corners of her smile illuminate the stellar pores of her cheeks or when the lines of wisdom on her fingers stretch as they reach to rest between yours—do this with the utmost care and purpose, and she may admit you to stay, to appreciate for some time what the lazy man calls beauty.

Your original list did not include these items. But you cannot be blamed. You are but one atom, bouncing around haphazardly in space, on a collision course with the inevitable, atomic partner in bonding. Your chance cooperation.

If you find this woman in this way, cherish her.

There is nothing quite like her in the world.