Look Alive

She Feels Great, Invigorated Even. Yet Alice Gregory Wakes Each Day To Deeply Shadowed Eyes That Make Her Appear Dejected, Defeated...Exhausted. One Day, She Set Out To Cure Them, Once And For All.

- Alice Gregory

I was lucky to grow up in a loving and prosperous home, though you wouldn’t know it from the photographs. Flipping through a family album, you would see, behind my smiles, an unearned world-weariness and an age-inappropriate ennui. There I am, on Christmas morning, age seven, surrounded by presents and parents but appearing, nonetheless, like I’ve just witnessed a human rights violation. There I am again, half a decade later, posing with my little sister, ice creams in hand, grinning but somehow also looking as though I want to die.

This is what I tell friends and doctors, facialists and nutritionists, makeup-counter employees, concerned Instagram commenters, nosy strangers on the street. No, I am not tired. No, I am not sad. I am not hungover or hungry. I don’t have celiac disease, and there is no black mold in my apartment. You might not know it from looking at me, but I like my life.

On a good day, I might describe the dark circles under my eyes as “mauve.” On a bad day, they’re more the color of bluefin tuna sashimi, which is to say fresh bruises. I don’t think they make me look old, or even ugly, really just miserable, which I’m not. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on concealers and hours upon hours on their deployment. Some are better than others, but all produce, to various degrees, a creepy, crepey grayness that looks worse, in my opinion, than my bare discolored skin. For years I found the best solution to be a distracting bright red lip. That only worked for so long, though. Now I tend to wear sunglasses—indoors.