Settling In

I started by clearing off the desk I had jammed into the corner. I'd barely even begun to organize my room and dumping everything on that surface into a pile was setting me back, but if I was going to do this then I was going to need space.

So the desk gets cleared and then moved so that it's in the light coming in through the window. Specifically so that, when I sit in the chair I drop in front of it, the light is coming in in front of me, illuminating the features of my face.

I find a small mirror stuffed into the back of the closet. That isn't mine, the mirror that is. It was here when I got here and it had been here the last time I'd lived here and the last time I'd ignored it and left it in the back of the closet and forgot about it until I shoved a box in there, six months into living in this space, and accidentally cracked it.

Seven years of bad luck? Try decades.

But this time I don't leave it back there. I pull it out and I prop it up on the desk, securing it just out of the way and off to one side so that when I'm sitting in my chair the light from the window is on my face and my face is reflected in the mirror.

And then, with a deep exhale, I upturn the bag she left me onto the surface.

The bits and pieces scatter out and I am still intimidated by them. Even now on the other side of deciding that I'm going to embrace it, I'm intimidated.

And it is intimidation and not fear. I'm not afraid of the powders and the pencils and the brushes and the sticks that I can barely even tell apart or remember the use of. I'm not afraid of the concept of using them, even, because after all I've seen them in use before.

No, what I am is intimidated. Because I know that utilizing this requires skill and practice and I don't know that I have either of them.

Pluck one up. I think it's lip liner. Way too early for that. The tube here is mascara and I twist it open and look at the little brush before I snap it shut again. Twirl the eyeliner in my hand and seriously I have to ask how anyone thinks it's reasonable to have something so sharp be so fucking close to your eye.

Okay, so maybe I was a little afraid but frankly some fear is warranted.

Rachel left me makeup, the makeup she'd used on me before we went out to meet up with the boys at the movie and all the rest of it. She'd sat me down at told me, in no uncertain terms, that she knew I didn't know the first thing about what I was doing here and so she was going to do it for me but I should pay attention, I should try to remember, because she wasn't always going to be there for me.

And then, one night later, that turned out to be true.

Reason and logic dictated that I should forgo this and just head out there now. I mean I was wrapped up in a towel and not even dressed, hair still damp and sleep still clinging to me a little bit and I had a deadline, I had a place I needed to be and a time that I needed to be there. Messing about now was not only not the best idea in the world it was quite likely a miserably bad idea, of the kind that could doom you, but at the same time I couldn't help but think of last night.

The dream, not the good sex.

If what was missing in this life was embracing my body and the life that I was living then this was surely part of it. Learning to love myself meant learning to live with myself, meant learning to know all the parts of me.

And when I held one of these tools in my hand and closed my eyes I remembered secret moments where Emily, the Emily who had lived in this body before I occupied it, took a chance. With the door to her bedroom locked practicing, trying out over and over with the makeup that she'd bought for pennies from the **** store and looking at herself in the mirror afterwards and wondering where she went wrong.

Wondering why she wasn't pretty enough.

Wondering why she couldn't make it work.

All that hurt and that pain and that expectation and that need wrapped up and tangled up together and all of it just brimming near the surface, a ball of nervous energy and self defeat that made it so that when I did open my eyes I gasped out, going wide and set and determined.

Determined to do this for myself.

Determined to do this for her.

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