this is the month you find a kohl pencil that works for you and learn a new favorite way to wear it. no online tutorials necessary, you just pick it up one morning and look at your face
and it's instinct, to draw mahogany straight down the barrel of your lashes, no tearing up, no hesitation. your hand doesn't shake when you repeat the motion. you look at the shape of your face
and remember being fifteen, invited on sufferance to a classmate's over-ostentatious sweet sixteen, and when you get there you see in their faces what your mother didn't know how to say at the mall: your dress is wrong, your shoes are wrong, your hair is wrong, your face is bare. you've never been invited to the fancy parties before, the ones held in a hotel ballroom with a dj booth and not enough lighting and the real party happening in a hotel room off to the side somewhere. how would you have known? your classmates pull you into the room. you still remember the cut of the curtains, the edges of the dresser. you look at the shape of your face
that you don't recognize. one of them produces an eyeliner pencil, tells you she can fix your face for you. only you have never been okay with people trying to touch your face (with people trying to touch you) and you struggle and they're too rough and you tear up and mostly you're terrified they're going to poke out the contact lenses you spent thirty-six minutes forcing into your head. eventually they give up and you apologize to them. at this distance you remember nothing else about the party but you remember them standing in the driveway after talking about what a fright you looked like and how even when you're trying you never get it right. the boy you've loved for years is standing with them and as you back out of sight you hear him say, quietly, that he thought you looked sweet. but he says it quietly and no one wants to look sweet at sixteen and he might as well have said that it's sweet how some dogs balance on their hind legs and think it makes them human and for years and years you despise the shape of your face
until the year you stop trying to shape it. the year you stop ripping your hair out by the roots for someone else's comfort. or wearing clothes that stifle your soul or biting back stories that feed it. your shoes are just comfortable and the only dress in your closet you found in a donation pile and it fits like it was made for you and you look at your face
that is just your face and wear kohl to hospital waiting rooms and grocery stories and bus benches and family gatherings, everywhere you need a little reminder that you've already got everything you need.
