24, With Tears

Thoughts and dancing before crying

Finally, after a redacted amount of weeks, I have cleaned my and my boyfriend’s shared bathroom. I am not proud of this fact, and I would hope that if you are reading this you are disgusted by my lack of cleanliness rather than relating to it. I loathe the idea that being unkempt, unclean, and unsanitary is something people might find commonality in. I don’t know that we should feel ashamed of it, but I don’t know that I would’ve admitted my bathroom was disgusting before I cleaned it either. Perhaps we lack a healthy amount of shame in the internet age, shame that can be awakened by being forced to approach your bathtub with gloved hands and a bottle of bleach. Perhaps having to examine the individual stains at the bottom and wonder “is this my hair dye, or a previous tenant’s?” is a grounding experience, best talked about after the stains are removed. It took nearly half a bottle of off-brand foaming bathroom cleaner (now with bleach!) to finish the job, and I had to wash my hands four times afterwards to feel clean again. I briefly considered celebrating with a bath, but it felt too soon. I didn’t have the energy left to boil a pot of water and carry it up the stairs to compete with our subpar water heater. 

What I really found myself reflecting on, both during and after the event, was that every stain and empty bottle had a viscerally anxious memory attached to it. Can you guess how many half finished bottles of 30 volume developer you have hidden under your bathroom sink right now? The real answer might surprise you - mine certainly did. One was used nearly a year ago to bleach my entire head while my boyfriend was working. A poorly thought out french-bob-minus-bangs situation had not satiated my urge to change drastically, and Alex couldn’t talk me out of DIY blonde while he was slinging pizzas. The second bottle was from the inevitable root touch up. After a scarring miscalculation of my ability to complete such a task, I left a salon at 1 AM with a miracle rescue touch up, performed by a strange stylist who moonlit as a reiki master. The third, fourth, fifth and sixth bottles all marked the various shades of red I tried after deciding blonde was too high maintenance. After dumping all of them into the trash bag, I meditated on my current shade: an “intentionally” washed out, coppery, possibly strawberry blonde - with fucking baby bangs no less. 

Was all that really worth it? Would I be dead, or cleaning up elephant shit with a circus crew if I had stayed brunette? Likely not. If anything, I’d have six bottles of developer worth of cash in my clutch, and virgin hair that at least touched the middle of my back. I haven’t even mentioned the collection of other products I’d half used after being convinced to purchase them by some 18 year old Ulta employee, only to discover a new spot from which pimples can sprout. Nor have I mentioned the various shampoos and hair styling products, the discounted TJ Maxx lotions, the essential oils, all of which I’m sure at some point I thought were the final key to having perfect skin, shiny long hair, and perfect tits. They were not. The only remotely endearing thing lurking in that bathroom was the rat king of hair ties I discovered behind my epsom salts. At least that could still be reliably used. 

Obviously, droning on about bad haircuts and beauty woes is old news as far as things women have written about online. I feel confident that I know that, and that I know that no product can save me, and that aging and wrinkles and split ends are all inevitable normalities that I will never outrun. I feel confident when I see women talking about loving your body and accepting your appearance that I am not their target audience. I already do. And yet, the bathroom cupboard overflows. With a freshly bleached bathroom I find myself at the beginning of the cycle again, swearing that cetaphil and SPF 50 are all I can truly rely on, that I will simply keep my hair up while it grows, that I will drink enough water tomorrow. This time will surely be different. Perhaps I’ll overlook that I am here because after an enchanting karaoke outing with my girlfriends, I found myself studying the creases in which my concealer had settled. I had all but a minor crisis over the way the overhead lighting of the bar bathroom had outlined the texture of my skin, and that the foundation on my nose had separated yet again. I told Alex “I’m going to quit smoking, I’m going to get the binge eating under control, and I’m not bothering to cake makeup on just to look worse anymore.” 

You’d think I’d had a drink thrown in my face to come home so mentally disheveled, but that had not been the case at all. We shared a round of lemon drops, we took pictures on Salim’s digital camera, and we admired one another's outfits. Raven got on stage and sang to everyone’s pleasure, then I helped Noor track down a cigarette. We gossiped in the moist heat of the outdoor venue, reminded one another of our undying love, and then took a few more pictures. Everything was perfect. But it was that car ride home alone that got to me. I thought again about my face in the mirror, in that goddamn overhead bathroom lighting. I groaned over the hour in front of my vanity it took just to end the night looking both dry and oily. I wondered if the bartender thought about the same things when he looked at me, or the girl at the door inspecting the “M” on my license. I wondered if my ass in these denim shorts was enough to counteract my lack of voice training, and surmised that it probably wasn’t. Then I arrived home and agonized over what my digitals were going to look like until bedtime. 

I’m sure at this point, some beauty savvy reader has a laundry list of makeup tips she’s ready to email me. I’m sure that my drugstore powder is the problem, and that baking a little longer really would solve all of my issues. Truthfully though, after waking up at noon today, I don’t think fixing my base routine will cut it. By the time I was locking the back door last night, the mental spiral had already begun to nag about cutting out sugar and going to the community gym. The bar is ten minutes from my house, and I am a confident and self assured young woman who knows that beauty is not everything. The bar is ten minutes from my house, and in that ten minutes I’ve decided to quit nicotine, drink more water, start working out, and curb my eating habits.. Of course, dropping my nicotine addiction is an objectively good thing. The body does not like to carry two lungs full of tar. Drinking enough water and getting some exercise are also objective positives, as is a diet of balance and moderation. Just as I know my looks should never be my top priority, I am also aware of all of these objective facts. Knowing things is all fine and good. However, it hasn’t saved me yet. 

The last psychic I ever trusted met me in the cramped back room of a chain restaurant called Magic Time Machine. She had rolled a thick layer of black ink over my hand and pressed it into a sheet of paper, and then prattled on about her amazement at my collection of whorl fingerprints. She promised great achievement and triumphs in my life before her attention lingered nervously on a gap in the joint of my thumb. 

“You don’t sleep enough, you know?” The neon reds and yellows of the venue’s many tacky beer lights highlighted the worry in her face. 

“I suppose I don’t.” 

Yvette died not two months after orating my destiny that night. She passed half way out from under her duvet, taken by a heart attack. Do you think she saw it coming? If given the choice, most people will tell you they’d prefer to die in bed. Perhaps she had been trying to hurry off to sleep the night it happened, and rose to brew a cup of tea just an hour too late. I try to picture the things she thought of in her final months, knowing the end was drawing near. Placing myself in those shoes, it feels obscene to even stop and consider my slowly aging skin. It feels perverse now to imagine her thinking of it, and perverse to observe myself thinking of her thinking of it. At that time in my life, I fancied myself a budding psychic and a decent tarot reader. A honed sense of observance as a means of survival (especially in an abusive situation) is easy to mistake for clairvoyance. The futures of others were so clearly laid out before me, while mine was as hazy as it was uninteresting. I couldn’t have divined the next day’s dinner in those cards if I had tried. Yvette’s disembodied spirit was likely as shocked as the comments on her Facebook eulogy. I’m sure her final thoughts were as mundane and unserious as they had ever been, and that like most people, she would consider them wasteful in hindsight. I give my thanks to God, or whomever it may concern, that she died with warm feet. 

It will become clear as I continue to write that I keep a mental rolodex of strange old women whose perceived freedom and perspective I envy. I sometimes imagine us all in a circle of lawn chairs, sitting in some flowered field, laughing over glasses of Iced Lipton tea. In this vision it must be Lipton, with mint and white sugar. I met them all in fleeting moments, some of them psychics and reiki masters, others wandering the streets of Harlem at five in the morning, and one standing by the back door of the goth club with a sweaty breast exposed. Most I know I will never meet again. Something in my face must be familiarly tired - a nostalgic kind of tired that only young women ever are. When our conversations finish, I am left with the sense that both parties are aware of my naivety - something they always handle warmly and with care. They are always haunted. You never quit nicotine for good, no moisturizer will save you, cancer is a near inevitability, and either you die first or your friends do. If I could condense all of the wisdom of my disparate coven into writing, it would say that life feels like a neverending open casket funeral. I am simultaneously in the coffin and the pews, wearing a sequin party dress in both instances. My crystal studded Betsey Johnson kitten heels glimmer in the chapel lights. 

I told my therapist recently that I don’t want to rehash the past anymore. She asked me why that was, and I recalled traveling an hour from Brooklyn to Times Square to visit my first therapist a few years ago. Her office was across the street from the Scientology center, and every week I’d leave more anxious than when I had arrived. This time around, I don’t want a thesaurus of sterile sounding words to sprinkle into tense conversations. Perhaps it’s oppositional to the popular appeal of therapy, but so is paying someone to listen to the stories I’ve already told everybody else. I want a shiny set of tools. I want a third option, a satiating medium ground between binging and starving. I want to take the stale advice of drinking more water, going on walks, getting eight hours and eating a good breakfast. That’s really the truth; the most pedestrian advice is the best anybody can give me. I’m young and in my prime, death is a far off improbability, so I delegate ample time to every hairline insecurity. I will continue to spiral and rebuke, try my best for a week and fall back to old habits until my hair is fully gray (which according to my Mom could start as early as thirty five.) It is embarrassing to admit, but that first therapist in the seashore themed office on the twenty sixth floor told me I was “very self aware,” and that she wasn’t sure how to help me. I understand now what she really wanted to say. 

There is a camera hidden in every floral arrangement at the neverending funeral. This is by far my most glaring personality flaw, but it is also the only thing propelling me forward. I am not writing for myself. Everything is embarrassing, everything is pornographic, everything is morbid and will make an excellent story at some point. I will never escape the cluttered cabinet under my bathroom sink, not fully. Tomorrow I’m planning to go to the gym, right after I tell my therapist that I did not meal prep, and my diet was less than satisfactory this week. I will cut bangs and grow them out a thousand more times. Despite my wildest dreams, I will likely have them at my wedding and at the crematorium. I will most certainly have to face the stains in the tub again, but it’ll take less scrubbing next time. Tomorrow, at a leisurely pace on the treadmill, I will imagine my coven and I on a dancefloor. They will be young again and I will be old. They’ll remember what it’s like and I will handle them all warmly, and I will sway groaning hips with a knowing smile.

 The digital picture that I agonized over. It came out great.