My Makeup Bag

            A Boxing tournament Episode #10

The first makeup I ever put was beige lip stick my mom got me from clinic when I was 15. Later, at the age of 19 I was introduced to the world of shades and magic of colors and brush strikes on what is supposed to be the best feature of my face; the big anime eyes  : )

During my 24 years of life, I worked so hard to improve my facial expressions’ control without a use. I still have one of the most expressive faces ever and people can easily tell how I feel just by looking at me. Therefore, I began to play with colors. I used the shades and different sizes of brushes in the only make up I wear: Eye makeup. Light and dark purple, degrees of brown and golden glitter and a whole rainbow of pink, blue, and green but above all there is always the magical strike of black eyeliners.

Three days ago, I lost my makeup bag in Cairo. I spent a whole day trying to find it between my hotel room, cafes I visited and my friend’s house. I gave up on that and started admitting to myself that my make up bag is gone and with it the small MAC shades I have been collecting, my Bourgeois eye pencils and of course that magical Channel eye liner.

At first, I was sad because I can’t afford buying all of that again. A bit later, I realized that the only kind of makeup I have is eye makeup.  I never apply creams, powder, base or even real lipstick. It is all eye makeup! It is my way of manipulating what can be manipulated of those expressions that I don’t know how to hide. So I spent my last three days in Cairo with a naked face.

I got ready for all sorts of activities between protests, so much food, long walks and meeting old friends while getting to know the new ones with a bare naked washed face. So at times, my smile would glow and show my 16 year old innocent dreamy face. And at other times, my cheeks would grow a tiny blushing manner when the windy streets of Cairo embrace me the way they do each time I go to the country I lived in and visited the most. Yet, the one thing that got me thinking of how my life has been going for the past two years was that 2 second comment he made. When I began complaining about my makeup bag a couple of days ago, he dropped his fork and said but you look so beautiful without make up then he continued eating and left me with a storm of thoughts.

 Sometimes we go through a series of battles where the famous saying: “It is ok to lose a few battles as long as you win the big war” becomes meaningless as the only option is to win. And my boxing tournament episode today is not on the young feminist and sociologist who manages to shake the floor each time she enters a room and move mountains when she utters her words of credible impulsive insight. Today, the episode is about a young woman who found herself going back to square one learning how to stand on her feet again before seeking more battles. 

A couple of months ago, we were out of our contexts enjoying a night out with a group of friends on the streets of Stockholm. He asked a simple question that led to a series of conversations. I still don’t remember what his question was or what we talked about next but the one thing he still cannot forget is how I yelled: “You’re just Lebanese and you’ll never understand”  Even though so much happened later, he still cannot forget that I said that. I never got to understand why he thought it was hurtful.. Was it because he thought he does get the complex life of a Yemeni girl who lives in the most contradicting country in the region, yet still walks on a thin beam trying to balance between who she really is and what everyone wants her to be? Did he think that I was so judgmental assuming he was another outsider who sees a rebel in me but a very backward insignificant society of mine? Was it that we have had so much of a friendship that he expected me to believe he knows that this whole US and Saudi Arabia portrait on Yemen was not right?

Between all the songs, silver, perfumes, socialism, monarchies, food, friends, freedom, oppression, poems, legacies and mutual fate that I brought to his life from where I came, I still don't know how all that has affected him. I always thought he will never know who we are and what we live and how much of that we’d want to share with the world… I never bothered considering his feelings every time an explosion in Sana’a happened, and he would ask how I am doing and I would give the response I give everyone abroad: “We are okay and we are on our own.. No one cares about us.. No one cares about me.”

He doesn’t speak or act much, but when he does he builds a home. That home does not last long, but it exists long enough to challenge the nesting doll in me to break and bring out the fragile versions of me hiding inside. And this time, I am simply not equipped to pretend that there is enough makeup in the world to hide that innocent beauty in my eyes or the broken heart I am carrying in a bag of eye-liners and shades.

I wish I could freeze that moment of stability; the moment of owning a home. I wish I could release the fragile creature inside the big nesting doll. She has been moaning in agony for a while but since there is nothing to do about it, I kept her inside. It is so difficult to learn to become so independent then one day find yourself taken care of only for a few moments then left alone again learning from scratch how it’s done.

I really don’t know how to start this time. I am clueless.. Maybe a new makeup bag, sugar and whatever my amazing city and friends can offer me. Yet, I know there is no way to escape this vacant space his departure has caused. There is nothing in the world that can take me to the very moment before meeting him when I was independent enough to tie the last fragile doll inside. What a price being so beautiful with or without makeup inside out that I have to pay :)

I am sitting here in my comfort zone that I know neither he nor any other man will handle. I am sitting on the street where people sell everything on the pavement starting with long black veils and ending with the most revealing lingerie. In a few minutes, I will take a walk to the café where my friends and I hang out every day and as I walk I would be listening to all the music that shows who I am; the combination of Yemen, Palestine, Lebanon and of course Egypt. He will never get to see all of this and so many others, too. We, Yemeni women, are too much to handle and I am even the double of that.

I am not sad, strangely! Though my tears have been running like a waterfall since he left Cairo one night before I did, I am not sad. I am happy I am home and very busy with school preparations, work and friends. Yet, I cannot help but think of why was it not possible to have that home I never had in my whole life with me now? Why will I always have to console myself with the two sentences I repeat during trauma: “No one cares about us, no one cares about me”? If anything I am grateful the most to him among the rest for, it would be how he unintentionally raised those questions. And how he reminded me of the very sweet innocent girl who wants a home where dignity, love, care, respect, pleasure and children are rights and not privileges that I seem to have considered  things I will never have due to how difficult it is to find them while I am struggling with my basic human rights.

I should head to get my new eye-liner and on the way set a plan for how I will learn to be alone again. : )