Oh, the Shame

Eyeliner was my best friend for as long as I can remember. When I was twelve, a girl at sleep-away camp showed me how to heat up the eye pencil with the flame of a lighter to intensify the look and from then on out, pillowcases smudged with black residue became a constant. With age, I refined my methods and choice of tools, but I became the kind of woman who always wore eyeliner. My husband knows to include in my eulogy that one of my proudest achievements of my life is my ability to apply liquid eyeliner in a moving car. Without the black wing over my lashes, the girl in the mirror doesn’t look like me. The black line over my eyes has become a part of me.

It's been a long time since I’ve felt like myself. The eyeliner is gone. Eyeliner is the purview of women who don’t cry every day; women who have a steady hand; women who have the time to dawdle over make-up application in the morning because they aren’t running out of the house with a heart rate in the triple digits fearing a white car pulling into their driveway. Women who don't brush their hair at the office because home has become enemy controlled territory.

Over the past few months, I have lost more than the eyeliner. Some days, I believe that somewhere under the rubble of the ruins that is my life and sanity, tiny shreds of my soul must still be recoverable. Other days, I hug my husband and simply marvel that we are both still here to look down the barrel of another day. The rancid smell of shame clings to us like yesterday’s vomit. Chewed over and held tight in the vice grip of the authorities, we live subsumed by shame.

Shame makes a mask of our smiles. Shame keeps us small and hollows us out. Shame isolates us. Shame kills us. Our humanity. Our ability to connect. Sometimes, our will to carry on.

We hide. We hide in our house or behind fake smiles if needs must, or we are feeling particularly brave. As the system churns on and on, we try to keep our chins up and poker faces on.

Fortune cookies tell us to be kind, for everyone faces battles we know nothing about. “And thank fuck!” I want to scream, the anonymity of our situation my only remaining friend, as I shake in fear every time a crow lands in my garden and for a split second, the movement I perceive out of the corner of my eye, releases adrenaline into my blood stream, preparing me for the next fight. The worst is never knowing what it is going to be about the next time. Never knowing when the next time is going to be.

When we lived in England, we were visited once a year. There’d be a call, “Are you available this Friday?”, and the visit would be courteous if not altogether pleasant. Cooperative, remorseful, low risk; an annual errand on someone’s checklist.

As I mow the lawn now, I look at our house like a police officer might. Just here is where they stood when they saw me naked through the kitchen window, where I had padded one morning for my first cup of coffee. Living under the scrutiny of the state is invasive, my nakedness just a minor embarrassment compared to the questions about every detail of our lives and marriage. I mulch the flower beds and will the tidiness to soften the perception that here lives a man who lost his humanity with a click of his mouse, one night, seven years ago. I plan to paint the garage door. Surely our lanyard wearing visitors will get that we are still human - flawed, yes, but human – when they see that we take good care of our landlord’s asset. My husband no longer lingers outside, too on edge, scanning every passing car, to enjoy the freshly cut grass under his toes.

How foolish we were to take these little pleasures for granted.