Since the beginning of time women have been beautifying themselves, a fact as true today as ever. Whether it’s tattoos or toe-rings, piercings or makeup, we like to establish: this is who I am and I’m a little happier for having discovered it. At 12, this girl on my barstool hearts makeup and is barreling along at a fast clip.
I tell a guy who owns a drone company an anecdote that is purposefully, almost too academic, but I also make it funny. Because even when I’m being charming, I don’t like to be underestimated.
I held the squishy baby as my friend worked on some coffee. “AH! I have your bags sitting by the front door, and I totally forgot them!” she said. “No rush,” I replied, watching my two children run through the house with their friends, alternating between hitting and hugging. At least they could wipe their own bottoms, I thought while absentmindedly patting my own stomach.
Still no one comes, and she sears with the growing realization she’s been played. Life just isn’t a zero-sum game. There is not a limited supply of goodness and beauty, success or happiness.
I’d write about how I am lonely and all of the friends and family that I have done so much for and given so much to never want anything to do with me until they want something from me or for me to do something for them.
It isn’t an epiphany—it’s the next natural step. The world told girls like you that you couldn’t be beautiful, and girls like you grew up and learned to talk back.
The numbness is intense, but so is the joy and the fulfillment from coming into my own as a woman. I don’t know it then, but wish I could have understood that life is a perpetual becoming and that I don’t have to know what I don’t know—what I can’t know. Stars don’t need names to light the evening sky.
Before this, I’d had my fair share of other surreal events that summer overseas. Sometimes I felt like I’d stepped into one of my favorite movies, After Hours, in which everything in one’s world gets tipped askew and the normal assumptions can no longer be relied on.
My love with her is completely uncomplicated. We love in this visceral, physical, chemical way, where her life is the center of my life, and I would die for her, and I would die without her. It’s an instinct. It’s love that’s thick like syrup. It’s love the has sunk into every nook and cranny of me, melted into me and changed my fundamental texture, it’s made me denser.
