Lipstick Effect

I keep thinking about the sheer amount of lipsticks I’ve bought since moving to Florida and the looming recession which we’ll inevitably be descending towards soon.

It’s like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot, but instead of, “I measured my life in coffee spoons,” I measured my life in Revlon lipstick tubes.

Just the other day I bought “Dusty Rose” and “Iced Mocha”, two shades of varying likeness, save for the latter, which is a more burnished shade.

Every time I become complacent to this place, another integer of burden reminds me of how I long for my freedom. Whether it be the inconvenience of waiting to take a Motrin for an oncoming headache or the foibles of my roommate.

I celebrated my 36th birthday completely sober. I can’t say I missed the parties for one rang in by myself, the copious drams of whiskey in their crystal glasses, or the goblets of Pinot Noir to drown me to sleep. My cousin (also in the program) and I texted, no we did not miss waking up drunk with red wine crusted to our mouths and the fog of an incipient hangover before it rattled our brains.

My father sent me an orchid, a large one, ivory, with tinges of lilac on the petals. The leaves are strong and deeply verdant. I drafted my letter for why I should go back home, back to the Midwest. The homesickness rips through me like a current whenever I least expect it. Of course it’ll never be the same since my mother’s passing, nor would I expect it to be, but I long to return home nevertheless.

Florida is not home to me. Florida is like some unexpected purgatory I’ve happened into, although, I suppose my downfall into a full-blown alcoholic was inevitable, what with the way I drank.

We all fit into algorithms, I read that somewhere. That’s like how there’s a reason and a season for everyone in your life, some more than others. And all the different lives I’ve lead. For a while I deluded myself into thinking that this rule hadn’t applied to me, that I remained in some sort of stagnancy, but the more I look at my life, at all its varying chapters, I realize that this is not true. Same as I apply a different lipstick or a different fragrance depending on the mood or the day, or even picking up a different novel to read at a certain epoch.

“Me, uhm, I can change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time.”

— I’m Not There, Dir. Todd Haynes, 2007