If you really start thinking about it, life is pretty meaningless. You go through the same motions each day, participating in events, and hoping for the future, oblivious to the passing of time. Each time you drudge through your day, waiting for tomorrow, hoping for a nice evening, looking forward to another day, you are essentially looking forward to your own death. Tomorrow is just one day closer.

The absurdity of it all is that the sooner you come to terms with this, realizing your redundancy, the sooner you can simply enjoy life, within the meaninglessness, and accept the futility.

Yes, it is futility. It is a series of events that lead nowhere. Sometimes in circles, other times into nothing. Once in a while to a perceived something. But always nowhere. Because in the end, it doesn’t really matter.

The happiest people are those who can live within the redundancy, not simply accepting it, but enjoying it for what it is.

I wear make-up to hide. I pretend it makes me beautiful, and it probably does, but looking at my relationship with make-up over the years it becomes obvious that it is just another mechanism of creating a lie.

Make-up is a passive participant in the role I play each day from dawn to dusk, over and over again.

I don’t actually look that much different without make-up on, just less drastic, or dramatic. But no one can vouch for this because so few have seen it.

I have let men see me naked, but rarely, if ever, without make-up. I dated a man, saw him four or five times a week, slept in his apartment, for over a year, and he has no idea what I look like. Yes, it rubs off on pillows, fades with the night, but still covers and allows me to continue living whatever part I have assigned to myself. And everyone else is more than willing to play along – outside of these parts there is nothing, and some aren’t ready to acknowledge this, so the make-up stays.

You might think this upsetting, judging my lack of faith. But faith in what? How many incongruities between what we believe and what is observed can exist before a leap of faith is no longer possible? Yes, people knowingly, and more often than not unwittingly play their roles and acquiesce to mine because most still believe there is meaning. I enjoy the production I put on each day simply because that is all there is. I am not looking to find meaning underneath the foundation and eye liner. The person I create lives for the sake of being alive.

For thousands of years the greatest minds have pondered on the meaning of life. Yet there is still no concrete consensus. That must tell you something. I know I am attempting to use lack of evidence as proof of non existence, but think about it a little. Think about all the roles you play. How often do you perform the same motions? And outside of your roles and those motions, what else is there? If you were stripped of them, what would be left? What would you do? You would have to recreate. There is no greater meaning, just redundancy that demands performance – an exchange of one image for another.

I use my clothes, shoes, jewelry, to create an image, but nothing has been as steadfast and loyal as my Bare Essentials compact. And on those days I really want to put on a show, feel truly beautiful, exotic, and [insert adjective of choice here], then I get it professionally done.

I never tell the girls what I like, or what I am used to. I simply ask them to surprise me. That is the amazing effect of make-up. It creates. They paint me, stroke on alarming amounts of mascara, and I am suddenly a woman with luxurious lashes, cheekbones, and full lips, in shades I never thought matched my skin tone, but somehow were coerced into it. I stare at myself in the mirror, startled.

I guess this is who I am today.

At the end of the day my make-up wears me. It is formed into whatever role I assigned it, and it wants to live just a bit longer. And I want to live with it. It is never time for washing up before bed.

The day’s events are coated in powder and shimmer, and the fabulous person I got to pretend to be all day isn’t willing to let it go just yet. As long as I don’t have to wash my face, I don’t have to stop pretending. I don’t have to accept reality. I don’t have to step off stage.

But then I wash it off anyway, because I love it for what it is in the moment, and  I realize I get to do it all over again tomorrow.