by Liz Bastos

This will be the year I figure out mascara.

I will have lush, long, separated, glossy, dark eyelashes over 50.

My lashes will draw people toward me. People, and gold.

I will learn how to use my lashes to get what I want. 

I will use what my 87-year-old mother calls, “lash diplomacy.” “Femininity, lambchop, that’s what I’m talking about, if using the word ‘feminine’ won’t get me sent me to a Siberan gulag for wrongspeak.”

This year I will not poke myself in the eye with the spoolie brush. That was the me that I am now not.

This year, I will know who I AM spiritually and in the makeup aisle of a big box store. 

I will not panic.

I will have a uniform. It will be lashes.

I will aid the younger generation with my knowledge of balls-to-the-wall lashes. (Like those ladies who hung on to their roadside-purchased Beanie Babies and are now rich).

They–the youths of Athens– will come and sit at my feet, rapt at my philosophy, my smart words about wand design.

I will no longer be a cautionary tale of how “natural” (i.e. short, stumpy, non-mascaraed) lashes can lead to poor life choices. Like poverty.

I will be That Middle-Aged Daughter. The one who wears sequins for day and is a lash diplomacy success story.

I will catch a man.

I will not lick my fingers, apply this finger spit to my eyelashes, and call my beauty routine done, a full face; no ma’am, I will have more respect for myself & others & my mother.

I will finally heed her voice: “It’s a crying shame that women don’t wear hats anymore, but that’s ‘progress’ I guess,” ::shoulder shrug::.

“Hope I don’t get all dragged off  in my advanced years to the wastes for calling things what they are!! Because the best use of that hat pin I gave you is to wear it! on a hat!  But, since you’re not going to do that,” ::shoulder shrug::  “the second best use is to use it to fluff and separate your lashes and to prevent mascara clumping.”

“By the way, you didn’t get those nothing lashes from me.”