My Dressing Table, My Altar
I like nice things. I am a Taurus moon after all.
I take off my rings, collecting them in my palm and letting them rain into a small porcelain bowl with a painted pink flower on it. There’s a smaller dish of stud earrings next to it and a compact mirror, closed, next to that. A tangle of necklaces hangs from the left corner of the large mirror that stares at me from the back of the table. My few perfumes are scattered across the surface where I left them. Some with lids on, some off. And my scent is a precise sequence of them all, layered. Lip liners are crammed into a glass jar that once housed an expensive candle. And though there are more lip products in my bag than anywhere else, balms, glosses and sticks still rest in pairs and groups upon the lacquered wood.
It sees me in silence. It sees me in laughter. It sees me ponder, sob and yawn in the interims and the meantimes. And it holds the things that know my language and speak it for me when I’d rather not. My dressing table, my encyclopaedia. It comforts me at my lowest and beams with pride at my highest, providing the things it knows I need. Because I put them there. My dressing table, my altar.
I think about the times my mother’s dressing table towered over me atop a chest of drawers. And then one day I could see everything that lay across it without pulling myself onto tip toes to catch a glimpse of the things she deemed treasure. I think about my gran’s dressing table, an ornate, white station for crystal dishes of gold chain and pristine perfume boxes dressed in cellophane that used to promise me Chanel No.5 would smell really nice if I just opened it. The stool for perching and primping has a pink cushion, now sun-faded, to match the powder pink walls of her room. A room of a woman who had once been a girl. And where I was once a girl peering into a rose-tinted room wishing to be a woman, I am now a woman who still feels like a girl. And still loves that room.
The dressing table will take different forms over the years. From a seated vanity, to the top of a set of drawers, to my bedside cabinet in the smaller rented rooms. And the things that take pride of place will change. Improving in quality I hope. They’ll scatter and tidy and strew and tidy again to my repeating frustration as they live to tell stories of me to whomever will listen.
Oh how beautiful it is to cherish my things and provide them an altar, my room the church. May I be buried with them by my side willing them into the afterlife where I will place them on my dressing table there.
Thank you for reading.1
See you soon I hope.
*disclaimer: this is not an intentionally religious piece of writing, any words used that are synonymous with any religion/belief system are intended as a form of symbolism and not intentionally in direct reference to such religions/beliefs or my personal religious opinions.
loved this!!