There’s the unfortunate time where your throat feels like sandpaper and your eyes begin to leak.

Then slowly, everything around you feels fuzzy and seems to move slower than it probably is. The voices of the people alternate between faint and loud and they seem to be all garbled.

Eventually, your head is too heavy to hold up and it begins to swivel around on your shoulders like a broken toy. That’s when you pack your things, trudge home and fall asleep right after having some chicken soup.

Or you can sit at your desk and labour away, trying to make intelligent sounding reports or discerning conclusions. Then you can watch yourself fail at it all, misspelling every other word because your eyes are too watery to look at the screen.

Her eyes look pretty. The dark brown rimmed with black stands out amidst the pleasurable chaos of the grey powder on her lids. It is supposed to look like smoke, I am told. Like your eyes are emitting smoke all while holding a firm gaze. The eyelashes open and shut with a lazy air. When she smiles, the sides of her eyes crinkle. It’s quite the sight, I am telling you.

You look really nice today; people tell her when she gets to work. They ask her if it’s an occasion because on other days her eyes are caged in rimless spectacles. She says it’s nothing, but everyone continues to wonder.

Beneath the creams and the eye gloop, there’s the face that would rather just stay home. It’s pain of some kind, physically or the more difficult variety. She wakes up to puffy eyes with bags underneath. Her face feels like someone came by and filled it with air, like you do to a punctured cycle tyre. She cakes on the fake beauty because she’d rather not discuss why she looks like a bus ran over her.

The irony is, that the days she looks the prettiest are the ones when she’s been feeling completely down and out.