Eyeliner
At a formal dinner party, a girl was assigned to sit next to me. We did not speak to each other; I merely fixed my eyes on her face. She was very pretty with a narrow visage, and a somewhat sickly pale complexion. What attracted my attention wasn't her beauty, but her makeup. Like all other women at the dinner table, she was properly made up without being outrageous. Her face was powdered and cheeks blushed, her eye brows shaped and she applied mascara and eye shadow, the whole nine yards. However, her eyeliner… was red, and only the lower one. The top lash line is still a normal dark color. It was a bright red between crimson and magenta. Strictly speaking, the color stood out around the human eyes to the point of discourteous, and I couldn't help but staring at it. It’s a graceful line like a slightly crushed crescent moon, thick in the middle and pointy at both ends. Unlike a crescent moon, however, there was a tiny downward bulge in the middle of each eyeliner, elegant and gracefully rounded, as though they were formed by nature. It was difficult to try to describe them in words; if we were to imagine the bulges stretched downward ten or hundred times, the girl would look like she was shedding two lines of red tears. Only that the tears haven’t fallen, and all they did were just moistening her eyes. In the mean time, I discovered the eyeliner was drawn very closely to her eyeball, almost on the inside of her eyelid. This was why nobody paid attention despite its odd color and shape. The red line would glint in her eyes momentarily and at certain angle only. She did not mind my stare, just ate the food on the table absent mindedly, and didn't appear to be happy nor spoke with anyone else. And with her pale complexion, she looked like a depressed sick person. I continued to stare at the eyeliner, couldn't understand why it had to be like this? Why this color? Why this shape? Why appeared on a girl such as this one? Why at this occasion. I was overwhelmed by questions, and I couldn't think reasonably. At this moment, the red eyeliner became the most important thing in my life. In the mean time, its elegant curve continue to enlarge and close in on me; every detail was there for me to behold. How the color red was applied evenly on the moist inner eyelid, and subtly avoided areas of friction when blinking; how the shape of the line was drawn smoothly into a curvature, and thinned precisely at both ends, while the middle part merged with the outline of the eye. Everything was enlarged continuously in my eyes. I could see each and every eyelash, pore and microvascular like under a microscope, revealed of their unimaginable irregularities and brokenness: flaked skin tissues, oozing oil, bumpy skin and mucosal surfaces. Even the eyelashes became gigantic columns covered with muddy mascaras. The eyeliner was the only exception. Its color remained even and its contour remained perfect. No matter how hard I tried to look at it closely, it's always flawless. There was no longer flesh underneath where it once covered, only a pure existence of itself. It continued to enlarge and march forward endlessly to the unreachable ultimate purity. Redness filled my eyes. |