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.

My mother and I were talking the other day, while Ross was driving us to our beginner’s birding excursion with the Massachusetts Audubon people (we had a great time and saw these many things; thank you for asking). I told her one of the binoculars we were taking was Maury’s old World War II pair, and she told me to be sure to bring that with us when we moved, because it was important to keep things that were full of so much memory.

I laughed and assured her we would, but then I said, “You know, mum, we can’t take everything with us. We’re going to have to get rid of a lot.” So we will. I already asked my father for his blessing in the agonizing decision to give away or sell his old 35mm cameras and lenses, the ones I learned to photograph on and whose clicks remind me of particular days, particular smells, particular qualities of light. It will break my heart a little bit not to have them with me, but there’s just too much stuff in this house. I can’t hold on to it all. I don’t want to carry the whole of my past that way, in boxes, saving it up for my old age. I have to trust that little things will be enough to remind me, and also that memory won’t be my only satisfaction then.

This afternoon I steeled myself and threw out a bagful of photos from the past four or five years. I have scanned copies of most of them, and most of the rest are rubbish anyway. I tucked away a few, mostly of people I love or used to love. Others I hung on to because they reminded me of particular days, particular smells, particular qualities of light.

There’s so much time left, and so much nostalgia left to create. I’m not worried about what I leave behind. I know I’ll keep just what I need.

Ross and I had a fight the other night about hair.

Oh, all right, if you want the truth then instead of Ross and I I ought to say just I, it might be more accurate to replace the word fight with the phrase hissy fit, and for hair read my hair and how much he did or didn’t like it during the year he helped me buzz-cut it to within an inch of its life every week.

What happened was that I said, “I’m thinking about cutting my hair short again when we move. Because it’ll be summer, and things will be kind of crazy, and it would be nice not to have to deal with it.”

Ross said “Short? How short?”

“Short,” I helpfully elaborated. “Like when we used to cut it with the clippers.”

“Oh.” And the faintest look of glumness passed across his face.

I pounced.

“Why? Would you not like that?”

“Well… not as much as, you know, the way it is now.”

“Why not?”

“I just… don’t… generally… like hair that’s that short, at least not compared to other styles. I prefer your hair when it’s a little longer.”

“But you helped me cut it.”

“Well, of course if you wanted to have it that short again I would totally support you.”

“But you said all kinds of nice things about it when I had it that way.”

“….”

“Were you just trying to be supportive? Did you not mean it when you said you liked it?”

“…”

And so on, for half an hour or so over a very chilly dinner.

We made up eventually, but not before I exhausted him so much with my accusations that he had to take a nap.

I suspect that this is a deep-seated hang-up from when I was 15 and my boyfriend broke up with me because I cut my hair short (or if not because of it, at least the day after). Have I already told you that story? I probably deserved it, since he was my best friend’s boy before he was mine and even at 15 I should have known better.

Anyway, if she still holds a grudge she can derive some satisfaction from the fact that the whole thing caused an evening’s worth of huffy paranoia on my part, 13 years later.

*******

I think the real proof that I am a (mini) grown up is the fact that an interval of 13 years does not actually seem shockingly epic to me anymore, and I am no longer surprised to think back that long and realize that I was very much already a prototype Meera then. ;-)

I grew up in a house whose rooms were filled above all with two very particular strains of music: the smooth, syncopated foot-tappings of jazz (Coltrane, Clapton, Davis; Billie, Brubeck, Ella) and the intricate architectures of classical harmonics (Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi; Mendelssohn, Mozart, Handel). Besides the records that made the speakers shiver, music also meant my father’s sharp, clear whistle angling through the space between his teeth, and my mother’s sweet voice quavering through the hymns of her heart. For many years music—though familiar and beloved, though a friend of mine, though calm and moving and inspiring and every good thing that it still is today—wasn’t really something I could choose, and therefore possess, for myself. All the paths to music I saw laid out before me were marked with the signposts of intellect (I was too childishly sensual), faith (I was too literal), or memory (my past was still the size of a pea underneath a pile of mattresses, and I was no princess).

Don’t get me wrong. I loved music, both as a listener and a producer of song. I was in organized choirs and funny little a cappella choruses with friends; I was obsessed with musicals; I hummed and warbled my way through my awkward years bolstered with the knowledge, some days, that my voice was the prettiest thing about me. But all that music was about other people, other worlds—adult worlds, usually, that were ordered and complete and beautifully, richly mature. Even the hottest jazz seemed that way to me as a kid, since I didn’t have the slightest idea what jazz was about. I didn’t get that music could be an instrument of rebellion. I didn’t get that it could be a secret you held close to your chest, or a bitter raging against the universe. That it could tell you in a single phrase who you always were, or suddenly show you the self you didn’t even know you wanted to be.

Then I became a teenager.

I now realize that I had a wholly ordinary teenage experience, as these things go—I was alternately cruel and passionately affectionate to my fellows, and they were the same to me. I shunned the idea of love and then fell in love with my best friend’s boy, and that was a whole mess. I felt the fear of embarrassment thrilling through every hair on my body during every single second. I turned my back on my parents. I suffered through painful epiphanies every other month. I had an inferiority complex; I had a superiority complex.

What can I say? It was the thing to do. :-)

But if those years held only one gift (and in truth they held many), it was music, music that opened up for me then with such emotional power that it was like a conflagration of exquisite aches. I started listening to the radio every moment I could. Soon I decided the radio was too vanilla for me. I read CD reviews in obscure British and American music magazines every week and delighted in purchasing albums without ever having heard a single track on them. As soon as I bought a new CD I locked my door and put it on, playing it over and over until the order of the songs on it had become as familiar as the thrum of my heart when I lay awake at night. I turned the volume up high. I screamed into my pillow in inchoate rages. I wept for heartbreaks I hadn’t even had properly. Music belonged to me, and I belonged to music, and thank god for all of it.

I was beautifully, irreparably, sixteen. There was no turning back.

*******

This entry brought to you by My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, whose album “Hit and Run Holiday” I listened to this afternoon while washing the dishes.

Despite not possessing an ounce of genuine talent, feeling thoroughly ill at ease with the idea of using my stiff, oddly angled adolescent body as an instrument of communication, and being prone to vast, secret embarrassment whenever anyone paid the slightest bit of attention to me, I spent six years of my teenage life involved in the theater. I still miss the delicious hours between call time and curtain, the adrenaline of an impending performance so like a drug that one evening it quite numbed me to the fact that three hours before the show a fellow actor had entirely broken my heart (by letter).

I don’t know why I ever thought I could act, though—these days I find I can’t even work up the facial plasticity to pretend good cheer when all I feel is boredom, frustration, and a powerful desire to pull out my little rolling suitcase and trundle out the door before anyone can stop me.