I’m on the train, and there are two girls sitting in front of me. They look like twins, but only in their make-up and presentation.
Their nails are long with extensions and pretty colored designs. Left girl’s nails are red, right girl blue.
Their eyebrows are plucked/shaved/epilated into sharp, stabbing lines. They are both wearing eyelash extensions. Both have a slightly darker lip liner around the pale pink gloss on their lips. Both have a nose piercing. Left girl has it in her left nostril, right girl in her right nostril. Left girl’s is more of a stud, right girl has a ring.
Their make-up makes their faces utterly flat looking, matte colored. They are constantly reapplying makeup to their eyes and lips.
Their hair is straight, or straightened, vaguely blond but with highlights over darker roots. They are both just the tiniest bit overweight, round without being fat. “Gironde” we’d say around here. Right girl has an attractive gap in her front teeth, left girl’s teeth are unstraightened, front teeth folding over each other.
They are wearing short sleeved, tight black tops, short, body molding shorts, and gym shoes. They are somewhere between thirteen and thirty.
The ticket collector arrives and they both, casually, move towards the exit. We’re on a double decker train, so they can move down, under, and around. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them sitting here again in a few moments. Assumption is that they don’t have tickets.
They make me sad, but really for no reason. They could both be so beautiful if they washed all the goop off their faces, the girl on the right even more so with the gap in her teeth. I guess I feel sad because their individuality is so compressed under the mountains of make-up. I don’t know if they’ve even ever asked themselves what they think about something, anything. They just want to fit in, with their perfect nails and hair and make-up.
They don’t seem like mean girls. They aren’t arrogant, and maybe if they were they’d be more a sense of their own personal style seeping through. They just want to fit in, fit the image of whatever influencer told them what make-up to wear and what clothes to put on.
What’s kind of cute is that they mentioned going to a girons. These are traditional music festivals in my area, usually in small villages and they can be wildly fun but kind of dorky at the same time. There are loud, traditional brass bands who often play quite badly (some are good, but they can be soooo off sometimes), alcohol, and a feeling of being overgrown kids playing at being bad boys and bad girls. It was cute because they were dressed up so precisely to go to what was essentially a county fair.
There’s also kind of joke in there. The “girondes” (round) girls were going to a “girons”.
I hope they had a good time. I hope they were safe. I hope that they are kind to each other, two best friends against the world. I hope they find out who they are inside, some day, beneath the perfect facade they offer to the world at this particular moment in their lives.
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