Pretty in Wings and Red Lipstick
by Kyle Tresnan
I waited ‘til it was all done to see what I looked like. Marie
brought her eyeliner, concealer, foundation, mascara, and lipstick when
she came to visit me last summer, and she put them all on my face.
“Okay,” she said after she touched up the lipstick (bright red).
“Go look!”
I’m really struggling to come up with a way to describe what
it’s like seeing your face in full makeup for the first time. I hate to use
this word because it’s kind of cheap and meaningless, but it really is
breathtaking. It’s awesome. It’s more than you could possibly expect. You
know when you smile so wide that you have to cover your mouth? It’s one
of those things. I looked beautiful. I felt beautiful.
Marie and I met in the Fall of 2012. We were sophomores, and
both of us were more alone back then than we realized we were. She had
been dating the same boy for over three years; I was living with one of
my best and oldest friends. But we rushed into friendship like we were
pulling ourselves from a fire. We ate together, we read and did homework
together, we watched entire TV series together, we talked constantly, we
cried in front of each other, we absorbed the parts of each other that we
needed, and we got better together.
She left a year later. She went to study abroad in France for the
first semester of our junior year and ended up staying for the entire year.
But this isn’t a sad story: we were good long-distance friends. I woke
up automatically at 7 a.m. to answer the messages she’d send me on
Facebook from six hours in the future—the distance between Eastern
Standard Time and Central European Time. We would Skype when our
schedules both allowed it. On a Skype call, I agreed to let her do my
makeup. I don’t remember exactly how this happened or what we were
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