Her aunt

She was sitting at the wooden living room table together with her parents in the spacious living room of her aunt's house. She loved spending time at her aunts' house, and with her in general. Her aunt was a beautiful and opinionated woman, at the time running her own English language school. She was also single, and would many times take the girl to accompany her while shopping, swimming in the summer, or whatever else she was doing. The girl loved the spaciousness of her aunt's house, the ways in which the rooms were decorated with books, artwork from all over the world (especially the living room painting depicting the rainy streets of Paris), Oxford English dictionaries, and student rosters. As the grownups would get immersed in conversation, she would patiently wait for the right moment to silently sneak out from the living room and enter the bathroom while closing the door behind her. On the right side by the door there was a washing machine, with a set of wall shelves above it. For her, these shelves stored pure treasure: make up and other toiletry bags, shampoos and conditioners, nail polish, fans, pads, and many bottles with some sort of magic fluids. She was not able to find this in her own house because her mother did not have the habit of putting on other make up besides the lipstick, and did not care a lot about beauty products besides the basic ones. Hence, coming to her aunt's place felt like entering a new world filled with items that represented a new level of femininity that she was not experiencing at home, where no particular attention was paid yet to specific ways a girl should look like or wear. Looking at the shelves in her aunt's bathroom, she would immediately take the small dark purple make up bag. The cluttering of the eye shadow palettes, lipsticks, brushes, eyeliners, and hanging yellow earrings inside would make her feel excited even before separating the two black clasps to open the bag. Once she did it, she would take out each item and examine it closely, even though she had seen those many times before. There were the red Dior lipsticks (as her aunt was blonde haired and light red was her favorite lipstick), and she would carefully lift the lipstick lid just to look at it, then close it and put it back. She knew her aunt would get mad at her if she would try these on, even though she desperately wanted to. Her favorite item was the dark blue Dior eye shadow palette, with dark purple and similar shades. From time to time her aunt would give her some of the items if she would beg her, but she could not get the eye shadow palette. Once she had spent enough time in the bathroom, she would move towards the aunt’s living room upstairs. She would slowly open the glass door and as silently as possible climb up the steep brown creaky wooden stairs. Once upstairs, she would turn right and find herself in the spacious bedroom where all the furniture was white. To the right, there was a mirror above the dresser, and on top of the dresser was a souvenir glass ashtray with her aunt's picture that she got from New York City in one of her travels. She would then turn to the left and open the sliding mirror door of the closet. She would look at the rich collections of clothing materials that her aunt carefully folded on the closet shelves. Skirts, shirts, fur coats, and hats. She loved the way she could take two sides of closet doors, pull them towards herself, and see herself from different angles in the mirrors. While glancing through the window at the sea and the surrounding islands, she dreamed of once having her very own clothes and souvenir items from her own travels around the world.