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It was a Tuesday afternoon, not a special one, and I had spent most of the day sitting on the couch not doing much of anything. The kind of low that doesn’t announce itself, it just settles in around late morning and stays. I wasn’t sad exactly. I was more like unplugged, the way a lamp looks the same whether or not it’s connected to anything, until you notice nothing is actually lighting up.
At some point in the late afternoon I got up, walked to the bathroom, and without really deciding to, opened the drawer and took out the blush. Not the tinted balm I use most days, the actual blush, the one in the small compact I usually save for when I’m meeting someone or going somewhere that matters. I put it on with the little brush, more color than I’d normally wear on an ordinary afternoon, and I did it standing at the sink in my sweatshirt, not going anywhere.
I didn’t do it to look good
I want to be clear about what this wasn’t. It wasn’t vanity, and it wasn’t really about how the color looked against my skin, though I did notice it, a warm rose that made my face look less gray than it had all day. What I was actually doing, I think, was trying to locate myself. There’s a specific feeling that comes with a low afternoon like that, where you start to feel less like a person and more like a body that is technically present in a room. Putting color on my cheeks was a way of arguing with that feeling. A small, physical argument that said, I am still someone who gets up and does things to herself, I am still in here.
I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone else. I’ve tried to explain it to a friend before and she looked at me like I was overcomplicating a makeup routine, which, fair, maybe I was. But I remember standing at the mirror afterward and feeling something shift, not fixed, not suddenly happy, just shifted. Like a window cracked open an inch in a stuffy room.
The color mattered more than usual
Normally I don’t think much about which blush I reach for. I have two, a soft peachy one for daytime and the rose one for anything more done up, and I grab whichever is closer. That afternoon I specifically wanted the rose, the more saturated one, the one that reads as more than I needed for sitting alone in my apartment. I think I wanted the color to do some of the emotional work I couldn’t do myself right then. If I couldn’t feel more alive from the inside, maybe I could borrow the look of it from the outside and let that carry me for an hour.
I sat back down on the couch afterward with color on my face and nothing else changed. Same apartment, same quiet afternoon, same low feeling humming underneath everything. But I caught my reflection in the dark screen of the turned off television and saw a face that looked like it belonged to someone who was still participating in her own life, even if barely. I keep coming back to that image. A version of myself borrowed from a mirror, propping up the actual version sitting on the couch.
I don’t think the blush fixed anything. I think it gave me a small object to hold onto while I waited for whatever was happening in me to pass on its own.
This isn’t something I do often
I want to say clearly that I don’t reach for makeup every time I’m having a hard day. Most of the time when I’m low I do the opposite of what I described here, I skip everything, I let my face be plain because touching it feels like too much. This blush afternoon was different, and I’ve thought a lot about what separated it from the other kind of low day.
I think the difference was that on this particular Tuesday I wasn’t just tired, I was disconnected, and disconnection made me want to reach for something tactile, something I could do with my hands that had an immediate, visible result. On the days where I’m just exhausted, adding anything to my face feels like more weight. On the days where I feel far away from myself, adding a little color felt like a rope thrown across the distance.
What my mom used to say about this
My mom used to put on lipstick before difficult phone calls, the kind with the doctor’s office or with my grandmother when things were tense between them. I didn’t understand it as a kid, I just remember watching her do it in the hallway mirror and thinking it was a strange thing to do before picking up a phone where no one would even see her face. I think I understand it now. It wasn’t about being seen. It was about feeling like a person who could handle the call, and something about the ritual of putting on lipstick gave her that feeling, borrowed or not.
I didn’t consciously think of her while I was doing the blush that Tuesday, but writing this now I can’t stop thinking about the hallway mirror and her tilting her chin up to check the color. Maybe this is just something that gets passed down without anyone naming it. A small physical habit for getting yourself through an hour you’re not sure you can get through otherwise.
What I still don’t know
I don’t know if this counts as taking care of myself or as avoiding whatever was actually going on that day. I’ve turned that question over more than once since. Part of me thinks the honest work would have been sitting with the low feeling directly, not covering it with a warm rose color and a borrowed sense of composure. But another part of me thinks that surviving an afternoon by any means available, including a compact of blush and a small brush, is its own kind of honest work. I don’t think I have to resolve which one is true. The blush wore off by evening, the way it always does, and the low feeling had mostly passed by then too, on its own schedule, with or without my help.
