Unglued

Eyelashes have a natural growing and shedding cycle. I’m thinking about explaining this to the doctor, but I’m not sure she’ll understand. Not about the cycle, of course. Just the shedding.

I want to tell her I leave a trail of eyelashes wherever I go. Open parentheses across my bathroom vanity, in the crease of my book at night, on my husband’s shoulder.

She washes her hands and we chat for a few seconds—long enough for me to learn that since I’ve entered the windowless examining room the skies have opened. She just called her husband and asked him to cover their child’s sandbox to keep it from getting waterlogged.

She surveys my face. “Ooh, that looks painful,” she says.

My left eyelid has an infection and is three times its normal size. It’s also a reddish-purple hue that I might like as a shade of eye shadow, but I don’t wear eye shadow.

As we talk, I take off my glasses. She leans in with a pen light and asks questions: When did it start? Is it itchy? Is there discharge? 

I guess that she is somewhere in her early thirties, which I reflexively think is, like, 10 years younger than me. But, since I’m almost 50, there’s probably closer to a 21-year distance between us. Not that it matters.

What I’m about to ask feels absurd. If she’s in her thirties, she’ll think she understands, but I’m not so sure.

She gently pulls at my upper lid with her thumb.

“Do you think this is from getting fake eyelashes?” I ask.

“It could be,” she says noncommittally and—I am grateful—nonjudgmentally. “Sometimes the glue can irritate the eye.”

I feel like I’ve been punished. Like some sort of perimenopausal Icarus, flying too close to the sun.

*

The first time I asked for eyelash extensions, I felt like I was asking to be dipped in glitter. I had no big fancy event coming up. I am not on a reality TV show. Simply, I’d been noticing the definition around my eyes had changed. A fading.

The lash technician asked me questions about what I wanted. I didn’t know how to answer, how to say I wanted my own lashes from 10 years ago. Noticing her heavy lashes, I resisted the urge to answer, “Not like yours.”

When we were done, she handed me a mirror. She showed me how to brush them. The lashes were thicker than I’d hoped. A little unexpected. I loved them.

*

“I hope it’s not the glue,” I say to the doctor. “I love eyelash extensions. It’s one thing on my body I can control right now.”

She laughs and says, “Something you can control. I totally get that.”

She prescribes an ointment to treat the infection. What I didn’t understand when I was the doctor’s age is how many pieces of ourselves we lose by the time we get to menopause. The bits of ourselves that fall away. All the ways we come unglued.

In the exact tone and words I’d use if I were talking to one of my children, I tell myself I shouldn’t get fake lashes anymore. I scold myself for being vain.

But this isn’t about vanity. It’s about joy.

*

Within a week, one eye has cleared up, but the infection spreads to the other eye. This time, I call to make an appointment with my eye doctor.

In the years I’ve been seeing this optometrist, we’ve shared bits of ourselves. I know we’re the same age. I know when her son started driving. When her mother stopped driving. Where she gets her haircut. We’ve laughed at the life-changing magic of prescription sunglasses. I know, like me, she doesn’t wear contact lenses anymore. Our eyes get dry.

The receptionist tells me that the eye doctor is out on medical leave. They can put me in with a covering doctor. “Would that be okay?”

“Of course,” I say. But I want to know what has happened, if the doctor is okay. If her family is okay. It’s none of my business, but I’m surprised by my worry for her—by my disappointment at not hearing her easy laugh when I tell her my predicament.

The covering optometrist is young and emotionless. She gives me a prescription for an oral antibiotic but warns, “It’ll take time to clear up.”

As if I’m going to confession, I tell her about getting fake lashes, tell her that I love them.

I don’t know why I felt embarrassed about wanting fake lashes. To admit that I missed parts of myself I’d taken for granted. To find joy in my own body in the midst of change.

*

“You don’t need fake lashes,” my husband insists. I appreciate this; he means it as a compliment. “It’s silly.”

I agree, mostly.

I concede because my right eye is still swollen. For now, I say that I’ll stop getting my eyelashes done. But I don’t think it’s silly—in the face of getting older and all that changes, in us and around us—to find delight in something that feels indulgent. To want to find small joys, knowing that they are fleeting, and attach them to ourselves one by one. To hold onto those joys for as long as we can, admiring them, tending and nurturing them. Wanting to let joy fall off our bodies, leaving a trail of tiny pleasures behind.