It’s gotten warmer out, officially too warm to wear wool, so naturally it was just last week when I decided that all my woolen clothes are my favorites. The olive cashmere t-shirt, the tweed pencil skirt, the fitted black cardigan, the aubergine sweater with the deep vee. Also all my opaque tights, my flannel sheath dress, my ugly, filthy winter boots and the long brown coat that my mom bought for my birthday are obsolete just as I got cozy.
And now I have to remember all over again how to carry off my summer wardrobe. It’s like having to break in a new skin—every season, whether I’m covering up or stripping down, I resist this transition. I feel like I get dressed in the morning and I’m out of my element, like I don’t know what to do with my hands until I’m back in my perennial pajamas again at the end of the day.
The summer before my freshman year in college, I was a camp counselor who lived, day in and day out, in four pairs of cotton YMCA-logo “flip shorts,” the kind with the elastic waist that folds over. The boy I dated, where “dated” means “chased after, pushed away, let toy with me, let coddle me, bickered with, and crept around in the woods after dark with” hated those shorts. He nagged me at practically every other meal for dressing the same way every day.
He made me self-conscious but I kept wearing them. There were days when I’d change out of a different outfit and pull my flip shorts back on just to disprove any suspicion that I might care what he said.
Sometimes, we would sit cross-legged facing each other and he would pinch at the inside of my knee as he kissed me. Right where my leg folded under, there was just enough skin to grab between two fingers. I don’t know if he was conscious of it. I was. I started wearing jeans when we met up after lights out.
Sometimes, I approach myself in the mirror over the bathroom sink at work or pass myself by in a pane-glass storefront and I feel like Lucas in Empire Records for a second, with somebody purring that one line from the beginning of the movie in my ear.
Baby, you are sex.
It’s my own voice in my own head. And I always listen. I love that voice.
So I’m saying “goodbye, winter wear!” and happily flaunting the bony ridge on my shoulder that I love* and baring the dessert plate-sized birthmark between my shoulder blades where appropriate, even if I am still covering up my inner-knee pudge.
* So much so that I just got up to admire it in the mirror before I finished typing that sentence.
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