I washed my face like I was trying to remove the whole day

Dear Delyara, Not makeup. Not dirt. The day. That’s what it felt like. I stood at the sink longer than usual, water running over my hands, then my face, and there was a weird desperate quality to it. Like if I just stayed there long enough, the tone of someone’s voice, the pressure of the afternoon, the heaviness in my chest, the feeling of being too available to too many things — maybe all of it would come off and go down the drain. It didn’t, of course. But I did feel a little more human after. A little less publicly handled. Sometimes washing your face is not skincare. It’s emotional punctuation.