The Lip Liner I'd Given Up On

August second. I have been looking for a specific lip liner since June. I thought it fell behind the radiator. I thought I left it at work. I had, at some point in July, quietly accepted that it was simply gone, the way certain things go, not dramatically, just incrementally, until one day you stop expecting them to come back.

Simone found it in approximately four minutes. She was not even looking. She was borrowing my counter space before a shift and she just, found it. Held it up like she'd unearthed something. I was mid-mascara and I caught her in the mirror doing this triumphant little presentation and I grabbed my camera because that needed to be documented.

We have developed, over the past year or so, a thing where we occasionally get ready in the same room when our schedules line up right. This is not efficient. Two people sharing one bathroom mirror and approximately eighteen inches of counter is not a system that optimizes for time. But it's become its own kind of ritual, her in her rust-colored shirt, me still damp from the shower, both of us trying to find the mascara or the right earring or, in today's case, a lip liner that had been missing since June.

sharing eighteen inches of mirror space, summer 2013

At some point she asked why I always crowd the counter like this, like I'm keeping things in case of emergency, and I said I wasn't aware I was doing that, and she said, 'You have four half-used eyebrow pencils.' I did not have a good answer. The lip liner was under one of them. She found it before I finished the sentence.

she found it. she actually found it.