I found that I had some addictions when I moved to Germany in an exceptionally cold January. The lake in Hamburg, frozen, an inflexible introduction to the country. I had to “adapt”, my mother said over the phone casually, had to find a local alternative. She was in San Diego, no doubt on her sofa with her iPad and tea, not willing to aid my addiction in her quietly regimented life. There would be no room in her schedule to stand at a post office every few months to mail me my fix across the Atlantic. But I did not question this seemingly logical idea of adapting to my new country. So I tried different brands, lost in the endless choices, trying to replicate what my lips cried out for. Nothing worked. The numerous German brands only made my lips more chapped. My stubborn lips, only accustomed to the chapstick I used in the states: the brand itself called ChapStick.
My friend Nico is currently in Florida visiting her lover. I ask her for photos as I stare out of my picture windows in the living room. “We are having a real snowstorm,” my children exclaim. I remember them as toddlers having woken up from their second naps, standing in front of these very windows, their short limbs and new hands pressed against the glass, marveling at the freshly mounted snow on the balcony, in awe of how quickly the world can change after just one afternoon sleep.
In the pictures Nico sends, the water is a picturesque melding of blue and green, the sand plentiful, the sun she shields from her face with her hand, so far removed from my frigid reality. It’s hot and she swims, wears shorts, drinks tequila, and speaks in Spanish, one of her four languages. She doesn’t have much room in her return luggage, but she agrees to restock my depleting inventory of ChapSticks. I’ve had this current inventory for at least seven years. It came with me when I left my husband six years ago and moved back to our original rental apartment. They now sit tucked in a plastic grocery bag in the disorganized top drawer of my inadequately small closet. When I left our co-owned flat, I only took my clothes, my library of books, some kitchenware, and my ChapSticks. A divorced mother’s toolkit.
A Wikipedia search tells me that a ChapStick weighs four grams and that ChapStick is valued at 430 million dollars. I wonder how much I have contributed to that for the last twenty-five years. Charles Brown Fleet founded ChapStick in the late 1880s. But it was the second owner’s wife, Mrs. Morton, first name unknown, who refined it and made it into the famous shape it is today. Incredibly, this little lip balm was sold seven times since the early 1900s with the most recent sale being in 2024. Like expensive real estate, corporations bought and resold it, and bought and resold it, and bought and resold it. ChapStick is so popular that it is the name Americans use when we refer to all lip balms. You don’t ask your friend if you can use their lip balm, you say “Can I use your chapstick?”.
I am sure my ancestors never used chapstick. They were nomads in the horn of Africa, moving and gathering, passing down memorized oral poetry to keep patriarchy and culture intact, against the background of pastoralism. All of them free of the balm that I apply to my lips daily.
Chapstick is a western solution for a western problem, and here I am, a Somali girl who has been captured in its capitalistic snare.
As a teenager, my father once asked me, incredulous, why I kept using chapstick. The endless sun in our southern Californian home beating down on his tan, sweaty face. I said only what I could think of: “I am addicted.” “Addicted?” he laughed as he raised his familiar deep voice.
Addiction was not a familiar word to him. Not culturally, not religiously, not in his reality. Not in the active sense that it was something to partake in, but instead definitely something to avoid. Forbidden topics stayed sealed in our culture so you could never discuss what it is that you were actually supposed to avoid. But he also lived with me in the West, all of us having immigrated here after our Civil War. I didn’t ask what his addictions were or if he even had any. I know he had vices but are those the same?
Maybe that is why I hold on to my ChapStick. Maybe it’s not a physical addiction, as society, friends, and family tell me with their curious looks and inquiring words. ChapStick was something I started doing for myself. It gave me agency. I chose my flavors—the only ones they had back then—cherry, original, strawberry, classic. It was a trusted routine. It’s still with me as an adult, after two divorces, children birthed in a foreign country, living far from where I was raised but closer to where I was born. I am comforted in knowing that this addiction is my security. A childhood remnant, a particular self-soothing of a young Somali teenager stuck in the suburbs, often lonely, always reading, and dreaming of the day she would leave those manicured subdivisions full of people that did not look like her or have her future.
My son reminds me of the story I used to tell him and his brother. When they were toddlers they asked me what it is that I put on my lips all the time. I said “It’s ChapStick,” turning the small tube over so they could see the logo. At their insistence I applied it lightly to their tiny lips and they giggled.
“Where did you get it Mommy?”
“In America” I said.
“But how? We are here?”
I told them that when everyone was asleep in their toddler beds, I would fly in the dark night, over the ocean, to America and gather my ChapSticks. Then I would fly back and tuck myself into sleep. They both look up at me with their brown eyes as they grip the ChapStick, like a stick of dynamite, bigger than their little hands and say softly, “like a witch?”.
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