Today was a day of wandering, memories, and familiar navigation (”If I got off the train here and walked this way, I’d end up where I used to do that“). It was a strange, sweet, sad sensation; vacation as reunion.

And my bookends, well, those were the best parts of the day: morning with Dana, sunny and warm, evening with Yael*: a silver bell ringing in the cool night.

*and Yael’s two exuberant dogs

Driving back into the city at 3 in the morning after 16 hours of traveling (our flight out of Houston, airport of scary Filipina — I think — women in charge of chivying people through security lines, was delayed for three hours), our taxi driver is curt and impatient with red lights. I think of our daily 7 minute cab rides home from delicious dinners to our little room in Puerto Viejo, over the world’s bumpiest roads, and of our final trip to the airport this morning (can it only have been this morning?) with the wonderful Alex of San Jose, formerly of Buenos Aires and with a wife from Venezuela and two lovely daughters (but only two! no more!), and I feel the sand of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast I have gathered up these past two weeks falling slowly through my cupped fingers as I reenter the atmosphere of this city, suddenly cold and dull in comparison. I’m not so sad, though. I know that when all the grains have disappeared, they will leave behind some molted crab shells, the wing of a Blue Morpho, and perhaps a tiny gecko staring up at me from my palms.

I am beginning to realize just how much I am out of practice with moving.

I am feeling like a nervous monkey about how strange everything is going to be, and how even the slightest frown on someone’s face will make me wonder if the whole city is going to be mean.

I am missing my home in Cambridge already, and imagining what that first night in our unfamiliar, dark, half-empty house is going to be like, when we don’t know where the best pizza place is to get dinner from and we keep bumping our shins when we get up to pee because nothing is in the right place.

I think about the hour and forty five minutes it took us to get from Hyde Park to the North side to see a play yesterday, and I make a mental list of epic tomes I am going to be able to get through on audiobook within months of our arrival.

I understand that loneliness is going to come back into my life after years of having been away.

I remember that when you move, you shed your history and become a new person, at least until you make one real friend who knows you for you who are. Who will they be, and who will I?

We are making small, slow inroads into diminishing the mountains of possessions that have crept their way into our lives over the past nine years in this city and the last three years in this house, and I am making small, slow attempts to memorize pieces of this place that has become, if only temporarily and without pain, home.

Makeup doesn’t figure very largely in my life anymore; it never did, really, apart from the occasional fit I’d have for keeping my lids darkly rimmed with eyeliner during the “black is the new synonym for black” days. I did go through a period where I wore liquid foundation every day, but that was because I hadn’t found the drug that gave me my skin back yet. Now I usually dust on a light layer of sheer powder in the morning and leave it at that—I own a few other face-painting tools, but they’re getting kind of old at this point and whenever I use anything that’s lying around on the dressing table, as I had to to in order to take these pictures, I cringe a little bit. (I watched a lot of daytime TV when I was waiting for my work permit two years ago, and wouldn’t you know it but there was this one episode of the Tyra Banks show where they showed closeup slide images of mascara brushes and lip glosses crawling with intricately shaped bacteria; I’ve never quite gotten over it.)

I do remember being utterly fascinated with the stuff when I was a very little girl. I begged and begged to be allowed to have bright pink nail polish when I was about six or seven, and I’m pretty sure there was a phase, earlier than that, during which every time my mother left me alone for too long she’d have to come and find me in her bathroom, standing on top of the toilet with oily red marks all over my shamefaced cheeks, digging around in her cabinet. I used to open the tops of her lipstick containers and marvel at the strange shape her thoughtful kisses eroded them into, a steep mountain slope with a treacherously pointed peak. I remember particular cosmetic items I owned as a teenager: a deep burgundy lipstick, horribly misguided clear mascara. The funny thing is that makeup was never really about getting boys to notice you, and always somehow about becoming more of a girl. You could pick the kind of girl you wanted to be, though, and choose your color palette accordingly. There was at least that.

Someone in Utata said of this series of images that they seemed to reflect the string “makeup, makeup, hide myself.” In so far as they do, I’m glad that they don’t match my life—but I’m sure that for many other women that sequence of gestures is, in fact, rather commonplace.

What about you? If you wear makeup, how much of it do you put on? How often? How long does it take you? And what does it do for you?

Quick—tell me, which is it: do people always stay the same, or are they infinitely capable of change?

Or is it only you, ever a sentimentalist or an optimist, who wishes to believe (once and for all) that one or the other is true?

Every time I come home I realize how much the sound of the doors opening and closing evokes memories for me, particular ones with particular portals. My bedroom door; my parents bathroom door; the front door downstairs. Is it just me? Does everyone hold in their neurons sounds as precise as these? Sweep of wood against wood, click of metal knob, slide of latch? No taste of madeleines for me; not even my mother’s perfume is so powerful.