I asked a college friend how to do my makeup, so we found a time where both of us were free and we met at her dorm and she taught me about the cupid’s bow. Marking X with the lipstick on your top lip before filling in the rest. She explained eyeshadow to me: how to start in the nook between your eye and the bridge of your nose with the lighter shade and gradually move darker as you move to the outer crease. She told me that I could apply liquid eyeliner with many small strokes. Small accuracies instead of one, long, meandering mistake. We used Scotch tape to make a sharp wing. She was very patient and said my hand was very steady and I said it was because I was holding my breath and I remember that I learned how to hold my breath for makeup from being a kid cast in high school theater productions.

My understanding of my body as a queer body begins with productions. It begins with shows, with performing on stages and realizing that I could be beautiful and complicated and unresolved on a stage and that could be the truth of me. My understanding evolved when I realized that I could leave a stage and continue to pursue my beauties and my complexities; that I could stretch out my unresolutions and lay down on them and dream with them. As queer as they are, as queer as I am. I once lived with a friend who taught me about highlighter and blush. This is something I’m still working on. How to blend shimmer and flush into a smooth image. A two, as opposed to a one-plus-one. How to navigate when natural becomes theatrical. In every way, I began as a theater.

When the pandemic started, my sister talked to me about how she was perfecting a “natural” makeup look. It made me think, What was natural to me? If it makes me feel like me, it is natural. I decided to take my nail polish off. See how long I could grow my natural nails and how well I could take care of them. I read about ways to keep nails healthy, dipped them in Vitamin E oil, cleaned them daily. People asked me if they were real and I was proud of their realness. They made me feel like I was real.

Before I took my nail polish off, I would talk about myself as a ghost because I didn’t always like my situation. It was my housing, or a bad job. It was okay because I was a ghost through it all. I don’t know where that logic came from, or what I thought I was protecting. Maybe it was easier to imagine myself as a shadow, a quiet thing. Being a ghost is actually a very loud thing to be. A haunted house is just a type of immersive theater. The best ones make you forget what you know. Everything that I know, I’ve been taught. I’m not sure where everyone else ends and I begin. I’m trying to navigate how much of myself is a shared experience with all the people who have taught me, and how much of myself is me, and I don’t know yet how the math works out. This is the special theater of queer living. We are the cast of our dreams. I’m not at all discouraged by this lack of knowing. In fact, I have learned to love the not-knowing, because around the corner will always be an opportunity to learn. Around the corner from there, is the small city block of things that I know. I know that I feel most like myself when I am made up, when my hand is coloring in the canvas of my face. I know how to breathe through my motions as a way to soften them. How smooth we can be when we are in motion. I hope I continue to move, with the speed of my breaths, with a steady hand, with a learning heart, with my queer body.