Eyebrows

They say that the eyes are the window to the soul. So, does that make the eyebrows the frame of the window to the soul? My eyebrows have gone through many colorful metamorphoses in the course of my seemingly long but I guess subjectively short lifetime.

In high school, I'm sure like many of you, I became extremely tweezer happy. Each stray hair that I found popping its ugly head out of place, I would violently yank it into extinction. This process continued until I virtually had no eyebrows left and I had to draw them in with powder and/or pencil.

My Mom used to be a jazz singer and drummer in her youth and she toured the country with her expensive sequin gowns, Hair Net hairspray, sparkly iridescent eye shadows and of course, her coveted eyebrow pencils.

"Honey, you've got to always start with a good eyebrow, it's your foundation," she would lovingly say to me as she would gasp in horror at how I had mutilated mine. Like I had taken a machete and violently cut down all the grass.

It became a ritual between us, her rose-petal hands pulling my skin above my eyes to get the angle right so she could fill in all the holes. I always felt so loved as she meticulously sculpted my brows, inhaling her dewy honeysuckle perfume and smelling the faint scent of her famous sweet iced tea on her breath. She would get a crinkle in her forehead, her third eye I guess, and she wouldn't let me go until my eyebrows were done "just right."

"The trick is short strokes honey," she would say. I would turn and look at myself in amazement in the mirror. "See what a difference it makes?" she was so proud.

Over the years, my eyebrows have gradually grown back to normal, but they still seem like abused children, so they have to be filled in for a night on the town or a job or if there's a photo-op. I've learned to kind of do it the way my Mom meticulously showed me, but it's still never the same.

You have to pick the right color. Color is key. "You have to pick a shade that is always lighter than your own shade, that way they don't look drawn-in," my Mom would emphatically say, waving her special brow pencil around.

When her brow pencils ran out, she always bought me new ones, glistening ones that were always perfect, never too dark and never too light...

The last eye pencil she bought me was about two years ago. It was the night before I left to move to New York. I was hunched over in between suitcases stressing about whether I would need my platform stilettos that I couldn't walk in, when she walked in with a new bag of make-up. She had made a midnight Wal-Mart run to make sure I had everything I needed. Among the make-up was the most beautiful eyebrow pencil. It glided onto my thin wasps of hair effortlessly and framed my eyes like no other. I called it the Super Eyebrow Pencil. It was MADE for me. She had found the ONE.

I have been using this same Super Eyebrow Pencil for two years now (I know they say to throw away make-up after a year. But, why waste a good thing, especially since the brand of this pencil has been smeared away from so much use. I have NO idea how to find it again).

About a month ago, I lost this Super Eyebrow Pencil. I have dug through the bottom of all of my junked out purses, meddled through crumpled old bank statements and ridiculous Starbucks receipts. I have scoured the mounds of important beauty potions and lotions in the bathroom cabinets. I have peeped in shoes stuffed to the back of my closet, crouched behind beds and sofas and even clanked through the silverware drawer. I finally resigned myself to the fact that my beloved Super Eyebrow Pencil was lost forever. So, after a week of searching, I went to the fluorescent beauty store and tried to find something like it.

I thought I found something like it. It looked like it. It had the same color, texture and packaging as The Super Eyebrow Pencil. When I brought her home, I began pillowing short strokes onto my brows with her and...and...it just wasn't my Super Eyebrow Pencil. It was slightly too dark, a bit too soft and it made my eyebrows look completely disheveled, sort of like how I feel inside. My brows were uneven, staring in two different directions, running for the hills.

My brows were sending mixed messages, also sort of like how I feel inside.

I've continued using the Shitty Substitute for The Super Eyebrow Pencil, hoping that it's just my technique that's off, and telling myself that it's just something new and I have to get used to it and we all have to try new things and it's good for me to have something new. But, I still am not convinced. It's not my Super Eyebrow Pencil. Just like, that person over there isn't my Mother and that person over there isn't my Mother, but, I'm trying to make room for new people. But, these people just aren't my Mother.

Last night, I finally decided to go buy some toilet paper because I was sick of using the left over Kleenex behind the toilet. I went to the drug store at midnight and found myself mesmerized by the sale on sparkly Halloween candy. After throwing a couple pounds of chocolate drugs into my basket, I started to hear my Mom's voice in my head. I thought I was just delusional from the chocolate cravings.

She was saying: "You just need that Super Eyebrow Pencil to make you feel better! It would make your life so much easier if you had that Super Eyebrow Pencil!"

I quickly dismissed the voice thinking, I thought I had hit the wall before, but this time, I had really hit the wall.

I high tailed it out of the store, anxious to devour my Twix and Hershey's. I got home, grabbed a mound of chocolate and went downstairs to my bedroom. As I was hurriedly unwrapping my fattening sweets, I glanced at the carpeted floor in the middle of the room.

There stood, I kid you not, my SUPER EYEBROW PENCIL. In the middle of the room. On the floor. Where in God's name did it come from? And why was it laying in the middle of the floor? It's as if it had mysteriously appeared out of NOWHERE.

I picked it up, leaping for joy, kissing the waxy barrel, so incredibly grateful to have my Super Eyebrow Pencil back into my life.

It was at that moment, I took the pencil outside and I looked up at the stars and grabbed a cigarette. I took a big puff and wondered, maybe there is NO such thing as death?

Like My Super Eyebrow Pencil, maybe my Mom never left.

"Short strokes honey, short strokes."

I'll get there Mom.

I will.