I looked at images of Biltmore Village, of Asheville, and of Lake Lure, through curled eyelashes. There is a cosmetic process called Lash Lift that takes even the tiniest baby bits of lashes, tiny as mine, and bends them skyward for 6 weeks, or 4. This means nothing to nobody but the wearer, who may feel a pixie dust brighter for it. The Lash Lift seems to rely on the same chemical logic as did a fateful perm my unsuspecting and very straight hair suffered to near tragic effect, in the long, long spring of my senior year.
This perm was so bad that loved ones did not mention its existence. I would tie things into it to distract the eye. This perm was how I learned to start a day under adverse conditions, noting that I was still alive, and that I was likely to be alive by day’s end. Under this unspeakable hairdo, I would say to that young mirror, I am breathing and I will proceed.
Now in the case of the Lash Lift, no such calamity short of perhaps blindness, seemed at hand. You just lay still while another human being that Yelp says can, does intricate things, carefully, around your eyes. In my case, Tyler was her name. Her eyelashes looked like English hedgerows next to my own breathy nothings. It wasn’t until she spoke of the traffic getting from Vallejo, where she lived, to this San Anselmo salon where I now lay like a caught mummy, that the absurdity of me began to hit.
Tyler came from a place where housing could still be had. She drove the hours with her daughter, who she had gotten into a good (rich) public school nearby. From the childhood home our family is so fortunate to inhabit, I too slogged along through traffic to get there. For us both to drag by our grip on the wheel these grand hunks of steel and plastic, these cars encasing our wee human bodies alongside coursing other tiny human bodies so encased, only to meet on the head of an eyelash or two? For the ephemera and maybes of more pretty? This comic disproportion had me quiet on that table. I knew that thousands of micro-explosions of an ancient fuel dragged from the earth and releasing half of itself into the already too hot air of the day, got me there. I knew that the traffic we lamented was us: I, deployed, am a unit of traffic, a unit of profanity. I am not the afflicted. I am the elective participant. Another woman came in for her appointment seeking darker lashes. That too is an option. I thanked brightly, paid Tyler well, and left without breaking the veil of How F’g Crazy is THIS?
Lake Lure looked like a town-sized macerator had taken in everything, and spit out a lake’s worth of town shards. It wasn’t so much wreckage as a monstrous confetti. You couldn’t pick out pieces of houses in the piles, looking. It was like trying to spot a tree in a mountain of wood chips. Asheville and Biltmore Village were different. You could see the most ordinary commercial things, like a strip mall FedEx or a The Mattress Store, just utterly blown out and ravaged. Swollen mattresses bulged through every window of the latter, top to bottom as though they had tried to escape. Cheerful signage for a chain juice shop hung above a Beirut bomb blast scene: everything useful that lives in a commercial tenant’s ceiling space was hanging broken and askew above scattered chairs and a slab of fallen roof. In another scene, the heavy equipment you might expect to help recover from such an event was shown pinned against a bridge by the force of waters, as bystanders wondered which would give. The bridge held, the crane buckled and went under.
This wasn’t flooding as we’ve known it, where something recedes. This had force and such speed. It was like a gigantic dish disposal lifted off its mount and raged through the night against everything human-built or otherwise. The brisk, impassive welcome of chain America where say your grande oat milk matcha latte hot tastes exactly as delicious in Wichita as it does in Albuquerque as it does anywhere the demographics (money, people) are sufficient to site it, was blown to nought by another extreme unnatural weather event.
As I picked through these images of someone else’s previously ordinary commercial life, I thought that to say “extreme” is the luxury of right now, and it is passing. How many cataclysms in a row can you still be calling “extreme”? Milton climbed right up Helene’s back. And to say “weather event” is the tissue paper way we hand words that are light to each other, about anvils of dismay we have not yet learned to carry. To say “unnatural,” that is the key. Both Tyler and I back in Lashville had spoken of the heat, but left the words “extreme,” “extended,” “unnerving” and “unnatural” unsaid.
Now in my days out and about on this errand or that, I feel by the mile the crime of it all. A truck passed me on the freeway, said “The Junk King” on its side. I muttered “Living in Truth or Driving in Sin, I am The Junk King.” We are these living hours and these hours only–why spend them feeling too absurd? Choose to eyelash but clearly, with all of your singular joy, not in the numbed and mindless Buy Factory. My own each choice away from absurdity, away from the horrors of my own rippling actions, are not sacrifices. They are freedom.
The great Timothy Snyder wrote in his defining book On Freedom that he believes freedom is collective and generational, and is the value among values. He says freedom is where we are individuals choosing among virtues “as people of will and individuality.”
He writes: “The space between what is and what ought to be is where we roam as free people.” May you roam free.
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