Freckle

The other night I was laying on the couch with my boyfriend watching Mr. Robot when he turned toward my face and stared directly up my nose.

“Is that a freckle?” he asked.

“What?” I gasped, quickly gripping nostrils and feeling around for a boog.

“No, it’s not a booger. It’s like a mole or something.”

“Huh.”

“Right there, on the inside of your left nostril.”

My fingers grazed the tiny brown bump of a freckle. “Oh that. Yeah. That’s a freckle.”

“Have you always had that?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh. I never noticed.”

And then we went back to watching Elliot do a line of morphine. Again.

As we debated whether or not Christian Slater’s character was real, I found myself thinking about that freckle. Indeed I have had it all my life, and indeed it is in a conspicuous nostril location, and I couldn’t believe that my boyfriend of nine years had never, not once, ever noticed it before.

I’m not pointing out his lack of attention to detail here, quite the opposite. I remember growing up and completely hating that freckle. I hated it because I thought it was so glaringly obvious and so easily mis-identifiable as being a booger. In high school, I would put make-up on a q-tip and dab it on, trying to blend it in to my skin, making it disappear into the ether of my air passage. I told myself that one day I would have that freckle removed, if only to save me from the embarrassment of having a permanent boog, a brand of humiliation that I was supposedly going to have for the rest of my life.

Ten years ago, this freckle was a big deal.

And now, it’s just a freckle.

I made some popcorn, decided that I really hated that Manic Pixie Dream Girl hacker character, and thought about the problems I’ve had over the last couple months.

We’ve been dealing with this ridiculous car situation, LA is been honestly too damn hot, my job, though lovely, has made me feel complacent, stuck. There’s a constant worry over finances, a worry over my body size, a worry that I’m never going to make it as a comedy writer/actor lady, the worry that I’ll never have enough money to marry the man I love. The dog days of summer usually lend themselves to being a little sad and stressful. I remember last year writing an August blog about feeling ho-hum. It was around the time that Robin Williams died and things were just all around poopy.

It’s nice to know that someday all this bullshit is going to feel like my freckle. Tiny, unnoticeable, and not really as big as it seemed at the time.

I like my freckle now. I like it’s something my boyfriend discovered about me, and that he can still find something new about me even after all this time. It also serves as a reminder of how much I’ve grown. Of course in high school the freckle was a big deal because in high school the world was very small.

And now my world is very big, and so bigger things are going to take precedence in the big deal department.

Right now the big deal is the car we just bought (and aptly named Murphy) that can’t seem to have the check engine light go off no matter how many times we bring it back to the dealership to get fixed. (Shout out to how AMAZING car salesmen are BE TEE DUB. I MEAN I CANNOT GET ENOUGH OF HOW GREAT THEY TREAT ME AS A LADY HUMAN WITH ALL THEIR MAN-SPLAINING OF THINGS. WEEEEEE.)

Soon, soon (just not soon enough) Murphy will be a freckle, and we will be proud we made it through and have him, and in the end it won’t be that big of a deal.

Freckles crossed.

(DOH. See what I did there? I’m going to try to coin that. Freckles instead of fingers? Huh? Huh?)

In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy laying on my couch, munching on popcorn and rooting for Elliot to defeat Evil Corp.

That is, until my boyfriend turns toward my face, stares at my jaw and says, “Is that another chin hair?”

• One L

“I’m shorter, I don’t have as many freckles as Ron, and I can’t do magic.” – Rupert Grint

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