It seemed like a typical start to the school year. I came back armed with a handful of new pens and a couple of nearly-fashionable tops I'd picked up at Shopko. Every other adult, though, seemed to have come back transformed.
It's certainly not the first time that I've been out of the loop, but it was the first time in a long time that I wondered if the bus had left without me. And that's not such a bad thing for me to wonder.
Tough? Maybe. But definitely not bad.
More friends than I can count arrived at school this year in shiny, new bodies, made even lighter by their sure-footed self confidence. These lithe beings each came to this state from varying points of origin, some spurred by dire news from their doctors, others by the barks of a personal trainer.
Me? I have arrived at this point in my life mostly through vigilant inertia.
I've had the same haircut for about 40 years. I can stretch a container of blush through most pages of a desk calendar. And most of my new clothes are green or tan, so that they may slip virtually unnoticed into their new roles in my closet.
I think my particular form of vanity comes wrapped in the strange packaging of acting like I don't care. "Acting" is the key word here.
But I have sensed a quiet stirring within me in these last few days, and I am trying hard to pay attention. Whether or not I succeed depends, in large part, upon my willingness to quit acting and start doing, one day at a time.
Today, then, I will take an extra minute or two to do up my face extra fancy, the nearly-noticeable swaths of blush announcing to the rest of the world that I do, indeed, care. And I'm not afraid to show it.
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