Creamy and with that clean grandmother smell
like a little girl's dream of what making up must feel like. Shimmery of course, as the name suggests, but not grainy like most sparkly shades which are thick with glitter like flour-heavy pancake batter. The doctor prescribed something new, warning me that it's known to cause nightmares, but I don't know if I've ever dreamt something worse than real life. Instead, the pills made me dream of the past (which I guess is slang for nightmare) but I'm not afraid of things that are over. Anyway, the pills made me dream of Beige Shimmer. I was in third grade when I started wearing lipstick daily. Most kids in the global north have their clefts surgically repaired before their eyes learn to focus before they ever get to know themselves as broken, but I had comorbidities and if I'd gone for the surgery I could've bled to death. It was the only time in my life I've seen anything prioritized over beauty. The surgery isn't considered cosmetic when it's on an infant because we aren't supposed to be concerned with the beauty of infants. It's regarded as a necessity. Fixing a cleft palate from a practical perspective makes sense. A gap inside the gap inside your face can make it difficult to eat and drink and can result in failure to thrive. But the lip, the lip you don't fix for survival the lip you fix for -- Beige Shimmer didn't erase the cleft but it at least made my mouth appear all the same color, a vast improvement on the lavender-gray upper and pink lower lips which resulted from some weird circulatory stuff I couldn't begin to explain even if I cared to try. With my Beige Shimmer armor I was less likely to be asked whether I'd been injured in a fire or whether my parents beat me or whether I realized I had something on my face. I'd put it on while riding the bus to school a pearlescent green Cover Girl compact in my left hand. After a while I could do it without the mirror even when the bus bounced over bumps and stopped short as school buses love to do. To this day I know my lips better than any other part of my body. And the satisfaction of wiping the excess from the corners of your mouth! Digging in real good with the edge of a fingernail. Bury me in that feeling. Sprinkle my ashes in a vat of a shade of lipstick that no longer exists. Buttery smooth smooth like you want your skin to be smooth like the plastic surgeon who finally fixed me at age twelve. Twelve was the magic number. From the time I was old enough to want a different face they told me it would be safe to reconstruct at age twelve. Imagine having the authority to make such predictions. That would be enough time for the blood-filled birthmarks that stained half my face to shrink with the help of lasers, so that a cut to the skin would no longer be a near-death experience. Twelve. Some girls have bat mitzvahs I had all four of my extremities strapped to a table my mouth cut apart then sewn back together I could feel the blood run up my face, the tears run down and I couldn't wipe away the excess. Sometimes I would cry. Jesus, cut me some slack, I was a little girl with a face cracked down the middle. I can't have been expected to keep it together all the time. My big sister would hold my chin in her hand and tell me, like she was telling me a fairytale, how women all over would kill for full lips like mine, even if they were lopsided. She hated her nose, but there was nothing clinical about it, nothing you could find in a textbook. Most of our self-hatreds go undiagnosed. Beige sounds so much more beautiful than it is, that exotic diphthong whooshing by like a jetsetter. Meanwhile it's just light brown. What do you do when you get to twelve? After the glass slipper fits? After the spell is reversed? After you are discontinued? After a while, I got used to wearing other shades (gloss was big for a while) and even sometimes leaving the house with an unadorned mouth. But I never got used to my corrected reflection. Beige Shimmer, I'm sorry you weren't enough for me. Only at the mountaintop of experience can we see what we had when we had it. Down in the foothills are daffodils with a buttery balm in the center. When you kneel down to sniff them, they kiss you gently, like your big sister kissing away your tears, and turn your lips a color that exists only in memory. *********** Addendum (Beige Shimmer Resurrection) My sister found it on eBay (of course she did) and had it shipped to my house. How rare it is to receive messages in my own love language. We live in and out of packages these days, the skin on our hands chapped and scraped from alcohol-based irritants and little paper cuts. So I am no longer surprised to receive a box without knowing its source. This one was no different, I figured it was something I ordered impulsively while dizzy with the effects of the nightmare pill. When I got it open - the case! They really don't make them like that anymore. Square-edged and beige and so adult, not a trace of girlish softness to be found. The smell of being so much older then, (I really am younger than that now.) Nothing about it is spectacular, I can see why it was discontinued it's a color for lips with something to hide, lips aspiring to anonymity, witness protection lips. But my face looks more like myself to me than it has in years. September is hydrocephalus awareness month, and while we normally gather across the country to WALK for a cure, due to the ongoing public health crisis the Hydrocephalus Association has wisely chosen to go virtual. So, instead of walking for a cure, we get to fill in the blank with whatever works for us.
I chose to perform “I Can See Clearly Now” because one of the primary ways my hydrocephalus impacts my daily life is by causing severe pressure headaches when it rains. Hydrocephalus is the accumulation of excess cerebrospinal fluid in the spaces inside the brain, and many people with this condition are affected by changes in barometric pressure. Our bodies do not regulate the fluid pressure inside our skulls properly, and many of us rely on a device called a shunt to artificially drain the excess fluid from our brains. However, shunts don’t adjust to pressure changes in the atmosphere as well as the body’s natural process of fluid regulation would. As a result, we get headaches when barometric pressure is not optimal. Hence, I hate the rain. It will indeed be a bright, bright, sunshine-y day when we find a cure for this life-threatening condition, which affects over 1 million Americans and can only be treated through brain surgery. I have had six surgeries to manage my hydrocephalus, and due to the high failure rate of shunts, it’s very common for hydrocephalus patients to undergo numerous surgeries over the course of a lifetime. We desperately need better treatment options, and hydrocephalus research receives only a fraction of the federal research funding of other chronic conditions with the same prevalence. This is why we walk, or sing, for a cure. If you agree that in 2020, headaches that can only be treated by brain surgery must become a thing of the past, please visit http://support.hydroassoc.org/goto/themeeshmafia to donate on my behalf to the Hydrocephalus Association. I put together a little baby chapbook of poems composed on my fire escape during quarantine, and I'm shipping copies out as poetry care packages.
in my homeland, what we do is
we drive around clover-shaped on and off ramps noting as we merge the sunlight rupturing the cloud canopy like the voice of cartoon Jesus we say things to each other like "Look how beautiful the sky looks" and then we say "Yeah" we park at the nail salon where a woman's transcontinental depth and breadth of experience boils down to "Pick a color" we pick a color confront the wall stacked with tiny tinted bottles shades on shades on shades the woman touches our hands she knows our hands better than we do she could pick them out of a lineup she knows if we smoke or bite our nails or crack our knuckles or wash dishes by hand we don't know what language she is speaking she finishes and admires her work ten identical tiny paintings she says "Pretty color" and then we say "Yeah" we go out into the parking lot hold our hands up to the sky admire the pale blue shimmer against the pale blue shimmer a pleasing match an offering and get back in the car. Yellow Arrow Journal featured my poem "Puerto Oscuro," about the resilience of the Puerto Rican people, in their Winter 2020 themed issue on -- you guessed it -- resilience.
Check out my interviewcito from their "Writers on Writing" series here. |
Meesh Montoya
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