La Voz de Galicia – October 4, 2024 →
For many years, it traveled with me everywhere, and today, as I switched makeup bags, I took it out and placed it on the shelf, like a sculpture. It smells stale and is no longer useful for anything other than holding the memory of that moment when my mother, who never spent more than a couple of euros on beauty products, pulled a red Christian Dior lipstick from her pocket. My memory isn’t reliable, as I’ve revisited that moment so many times that I no longer know if what I said is what I think I said or what I actually said. But I remember the feeling because that was yet another sign of that thing we couldn’t name for a few years. That thing that still accompanies us but that we now accept as normal because it is normal.
That day, Maruxa told me her lips were dry, so she went into a store and bought a lipstick, and I, seeing something so different from what she would usually buy, asked her how much it had cost, and she said eighteen euros, and I explained to her that eighteen euros were three thousand pesetas, and she looked at me, startled, and asked why she bought it if she didn’t like red. It could have been a slip, a meaningless mistake. But now we know that memory loss and dementia, whatever surname it may have, manifests itself in as many forms as there are people in the world, and is as diverse as we are…
And now, with the lipstick sitting there, I think about what I wrote a couple of weeks ago about accumulating objects that “carry the memory of a moment,” and I know I don’t want to get rid of it, because if I’m lucky enough to grow old, I will probably end up buying one, just like my mother did, because by then, dementia will just be normal…