Running With Myself

On the ground, my legs make the
          earth plural.
The multiple selves standing—
         I provide the space of proving
         the fact of more space needing to be provided.

As where one foot plants in the self-assured
         knowledge of
                  yes,
                  this is me.

As where another foot hovers,
         unsure of which earth
         on which to stand.

Because this is me standing,
         And this is me unshivering.
         And this is me,
         the plurality of
                 yes.

*

As where I sit outside,
         global warming providing me warmth
         with just a hoodie.
         Summer in January.

*

And I remember the sound of
         her voice in her whetted eyes.
And there was the hard conversation
         as where I held my knees up to my chest.
And the leather furniture clenched our bodies.
And our eyes took hold of the feel of
         hearts beating in rhythm,
         the cyclicity of our melodic conversing,
         skin stretching, closing in on the space inhaling
         between our bodies.
And I hear the late January sun striking her eyes.
Because there we were.
Because here we are.
And because this is the hard wooden floors
          that keeps us steady.
As where steady is a word that
         sinks into our bellies.
Because this is the space we need.
As where here I wait on a metal bench,
         the January cold not evident.
And I wait.
And I pause for her.
And I smoke.
And I write.
As where this feels right.
As where it has always felt ripe,
         the idea of her skin moving closer to mine.
As where the silver wisps
         of smoke and breath
         integrate into the air.
Because I wait,
         always.
And I love.

My feet planted on the ground.

December 31^st, 6pm

In six hours, the year will renew itself. In six hours, I will be in bed, tossing the blankets over my head to muffle the sound of the city celebrating. I will wake with knots in my hair and bags under my eyes to the sound of dogs howling. They will be confused, like the birds in the trees—animals lost in the yawps of the world exploding. I will not be exploding, will not shout out that yes, I made it through another year. Because it is just another day, a marker we have made. But if I were to look back at this year, turn my eyes back in my mind to see what I have seen this year, I would be looking at a wandering, sometimes lonely soul finding itself wonderfully trapped in unbelievably amazing circumstances. A renewed writing career, a meeting of a new friend, a job finally quit, vacations with the purpose of writing, a move to a new city, the accumulation of day jobs, the feeling of reading another email in which the sender informs me of an accepted essay, the quitting of day jobs and the preparation to begin another real job, the continued writing through all of this, and the constant realization that yes, this is home.

December 31^st, 7pm

This year I learned to light candles. I have learned to sit and watch the snow pour down, to see the world as it lives outside of me. And when I look out, look up from my notebook, I feel that world inside of me. This year, I learned to follow the rhythm of my body, to wake up in the early hours to a mind that is constantly writing. I have learned to let that be the case, to know that it is true to myself, this pattern of waking, writing, breathing, living.

December 31^st, 8pm

On this final night of the year, I watch the sky confuse itself with the earth. Outside, the world has turned white as the snow whorls around bare tree limbs. Inside, my candle is lit while my eye lids begin to droop. I would force myself to stay up and watch the year tick over, but that is not what is important to me. Instead, I will follow the rhythms of my body, lie down with my heavy breath, and wake to the still white of the world in my favorite 3am hour. Because it is those early morning hours which I treasure the most, the morning meditation of words and writing that lifts my heart up to the new day. And tomorrow, I will rise at 3am like I have risen every morning this year, and I will celebrate the continuation of a practice, this life.

*

January 1^st, 3am

And so it begins, and so it continues. It is the first day of a new year, a first day of this year in which I wake up early to write. It is a morning like every other morning. I did not wake a few hours ago to the sound of dogs howling at the world exploding, but only momentarily opened my eyes to the ding of my phone as it beeped in Happy New Year text messages from friends who do not live here. On this morning, I sit in the large comfy brown leather chair in the living room, my notebook in my lap, the window cracked open next to me, and a sharp wind juts in through the screen, winter finally making an announcement, briefly rustling the pages of my words, the first ones written in this new year.

Things that are the same in this new year: the lit candle, the blue pen, the spiral notebook, the phone keeping time, this first set in a series of ten minutes I will use to awaken my brain.

But there is something in me that says something should feel different. This happens every January 1^st, this pressure to feel different and renewed. God knows where this pressure comes from. Society, probably, like most things that make me feel pressured. But nothing actually feels new or changed right now, on this morning, on this first day of 2012. The only difference I feel will be to remember to write 2012 for the date. And that feels odd, foreign, new. But I will adjust, like I always adjust to the new. Like I did to the newness of waking up at 3am to write for that first time just over a year ago. Like I did to the realization I had this past year that this body is mine, is something in which I can claim as my home.

These are my first moments in my new home for the first time in this new year. And it is a home I have always felt somewhere inside of me. The hard wood floors, the walls of books, the dogs’ nails that clatter on the floor, the chair in which to curl up and write, the writer friend just down the hall, the body as it continues to find comfort in this home.

I sense this new year will bring me to a newer sense of home. I have been progressing to that concept this past year. And on this first day of a new year, I find myself in my home, breathing with a refreshed breath that, yes, I am here.

Happy New Year, New Day, The Everyday.

Writing is about community, even if you write alone. – Natalie Goldberg

I read her words and feel as if I am looking through my skin. Her words are published, but they are not final words. The words are never done with themselves. Even while I read her book, as I crawl through my identification with Madness, I can feel the words expanding, growing, breathing.

They live in me. I hear them, sense the scenes of her mania rising in my blood. I read and I write about my own mania, about how the words make me feel a bit manic. I am not alone. She, the author, is with me, talking to me, pushing me to consider, to go on, to live.

I am not alone in this reading, in this writing.

It is two years after I have finally finished Madness, have gotten through my own considerations of the madness in my life, madness I used to never want to deal with, but am dealing with now, because of those words, because I have written about them in my journal and have started to talk about them with my therapist, words that inspired me to live and breathe through healing actions that help to restore me to sanity. My friend in Chicago reads the memoir. She has depression, and alcoholism is prevalent in her family. She reads Madness and she calls me. It’s like I’m feeling her words inside of me. Her writing matches what she is saying. What she is saying is that, “Here’s the hell of it: madness doesn’t announce itself. There isn’t time to prepare for its coming. It shows up without calling and sits in your kitchen ashing in your plant. You ask how long it plans to stay; it shrugs its shoulders, gets up, and starts digging through the fridge” (225). And while her words are not an unwanted house guest, they do sit, they do stay, they do become a part of me, a part of my mind, a part of my body. My friend feels this, too.

The words announce themselves in my bones, sit down, and stay.

Two years after I have finished Madness, I write an essay about living as a woman with bipolar disorder. It is an essay about healing and finding my way through life, through life that is lived with the effects of a mental illness. What I am doing is taking my graduate thesis and turning it into a five page essay. Madness was a part of that thesis, proof to my thoughts on how the body performs mental illness.

To write this essay, to get into the voice of a woman considering her mental illness, I re-read through sections of Madness. I sink into the words, let each one of them trot back down into my bones. I begin to feel where these words live inside of me, how they have encouraged me to write my own story. They enter. They stay. I write.

My essay is accepted into an anthology, and I can immediately feel a footnote being written that thanks her for being brave in getting all of those lived words onto the page.

The words live on the page. Words that expand in my body.

Writing is about community, even when you write alone. – Natalie Goldberg

At 3am, I write alone. At 3am, I am actually not alone in my writing. I live with an author, with a woman who has put life into her words. She has lived these words, and so she brings them to life in her writing. At 3am, I am not alone in my writing. My roommate and I wake up around the same time, our bodies like dogs who can sense when it is feeding time. Bodies that have formed the habit of writing at 3am, and so they become bodies that naturally wake up in the dark morning hours to feed the habit, to quench our desire to describe, get our inward selves out onto the page.

At 3am I sit alone in my room and write, sit alone but am not alone when I write.

I am never alone when I write. I take the words I have read, words in every book my eyes have ever soaked in, and I bring these words with me, bring them to the page. Sometimes they take the form of vocabulary– “crepuscular” learned from reading Orlando—and sometimes the form and structure of each sentence is reflected on my page, (parenthesis that swell with simple, precise descriptions seen in Funeral for a Dog).

At 3am, I light my candle (peach). It is during this crepuscular hour that I write myself alive. I take the words I have read, thoughts and images and the specific formation of letters found within books, and I begin to write.

At 3am, I can feel it. I can hear my roommate down the hall typing out her own experience. And I can sense the experiences of others, the community of words that live within my skin and rise up into my fingers, the words inspiring my hands to delve into the words of my own experience. I dig. I write. I am never alone.

An idea came to me last night. Write an essay that describes how the body responds to the different symptoms of a mentally ill mind. To take the brain chemistry into the body and see what happens when symptoms are lived, described. I want to explore the feelings in the body of the words that declare what an ill mind is. Words like grandiosity, irritability, detatchment, inability to feel desire, rapid thinking, paranoia, anxiety, and the like.

First up (because I was depressed last week and this is how I was feeling…no worries, though, I’m feeling awesome now!): Emptiness.

Emptiness

Sometimes, it grows. Sometimes, it deepens.

Emptiness is when you are lying in bed, your back numb on the brown sheets, numb from being a back lying in bed for so long. With this numb back on this brown colored bed, you lie with the emptiness. It pushes through your skin, nestles in the spaces behind your eyes, under your retina, the hollows of your bones, the layer of blood slowly slinking through the veins of your stagnant back. The skin, confused as to what creature it covers.

Emptiness has crept in, has seeped in through the pores in your skin of your tired toes. Perhaps it started earlier in the day, in the week. Perhaps its creeping, its growing, its multiplying in your body started awhile ago. You were at work when your feet began to detach, when your body began to hollow. You were at dinner with your friend when your legs began to mist. Your friend sat talking, curling Pad Thai around her fork, bits of egg tangling in sticky brown noodles while the emptiness, the void hit your kneecaps.

That was a few days ago, or maybe yesterday. Time slows down in emptiness. Its meaning has nowhere to go.

And as the creeping continues, as the shift shifts through your body, the emptiness yawps. You lie down in the face of this spreading, barking gape, because there is nothing else to do. You have plenty you have to do, your lists dusting from the days they have been lying around, waiting for your impetus to do, to tick off.

Lie on bed. Check.

This is not on the list, but it should be. So you lie. In your supine position, you see the white ceiling, the spot where it meets your tan walls, where the paint has crossed over, white penetrating the vertical brown. The top streaming down. A violation of when things should stop. Where lines should be drawn, it instead turns downward, seeps, weeps.

And now it has been awhile. And now it still continues. You return from the coffee shop in which you tried to live out in the world, to prove that you were a being who was doing, and as you sat in the black cushioned booth, you felt the mist traversing through your cells, the legs gaining weight with nothing. Your body needed to lie down against the oppression. And so you return home, return to your room that now feels more like a cave, and you lie, unable to resist, to change the way the emptiness has crashed into your bones, pressed on the inside of your skin.

It’s there, has found its home in telling you what not to do, in helping you to not do. Your ears ring with the silence of its home, with the sound of nothing. Emptiness. And so as your back numbs into the mattress, your eyes unfocus on the spot where white crosses into tan, and your head begins to fade.

The emptiness takes over, squats in the home that should be your body, should be a body living, doing.

Friends become past ideas. Spirituality, an illusion. In emptiness, you no longer exist.

You wait. Your body does not sleep, but continues to numb. It is too gone to sleep, too far away to function properly. You wait. You wait with your body stiff for the emptiness to become bored, for it to realize it fills a space that no longer responds, resists. You wait for it to realize the control it has is no longer fun. You hope the emptiness will become impatient, as you become bored with yourself and time begins to tire.

You wait.

“In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write….There is a great sense of autonomy and security to know we can write anyplace. If you want to write, finally you’ll find a way no matter what.” –Natalie Goldberg

I write in anyplace I am. In the same way my body is with me at all times, the writing is also with me. Words forming into lines in my head. I feel the writing life within me, the thoughts that eventually and always lean into the page.

I am outside of Bob’s Java Hut, again. The sun has made its appearance, and is starting to warm my ears. I sip at my americano and I think of the amount of time I have spent writing, of the life I have created living in this writing space.

I am also thinking and dreaming about the feeling of settledness–of sinking into the body, and letting the body be itself, grow into itself. My eyes, the lids still sleeping. Even with the early morning breeze dirting into my ears, caressing the lobes and shifting its way around my shoulders, the eyelids are still believing they are closed, in another space–the space of dreaming.

I have taken the day off of work, given myself the time and space in which to feel I am alive. Breathing into me and motioning my fingers toward making movements of love and compassion. I type and write to heal. I knit to feel settled and bend into the notion of focused. A vague sense of concentration drifts through my body, claiming its space and concept in the cozy home of myself.

The glass ashtray on the white picnic table sits serenly. It is patient and waiting, ready to hold the ash I leave behind–the past parts of me that will eventually swirl into the fall air. The sun continues on its trajectory upwards, forever travelling on its own circular path of home. It welcomes its sense of growth, as it cannot avoid the fact of growing and moving self. It blazes in the joy of being alive. As the sun is always with itself, in itself, practicing its calm and steady zen-like movements, my eyelids, as well, slowly continue their trajectory upwards.

“[We concentrate] not by blocking out the world, but by allowing it to exist.” -Natalie Goldberg

I am at my desk. My desk is really a black fold-away padded table I bought at Target for $30, with a fold-up chair to match. I am not sitting on that dark cherry wood chair with matching black padding, also $30. Instead, I am sitting at my desk in a different padded chair, this one an old rickety wooden one, tan in color, blue in padding, previously used, I assume, for sitting at a kitchen table. I do not own a kitchen table. I did, however, at one point live in a neighborhood with great alleys. Alleys that are the heart of the city of Chicago. Alleys that are rivers that (with the help of large men, usually brown) whisk away the discarded possessions of people moving. Possessions like a light brown kitchen table chair, padded in blue and spotted with white dried dots of paint. I helped with its whisking away, away and into my apartment.

I am at my desk, in my chair. The light outside is crawling from black to a steely blue. I cannot, in fact, see the light due to the building in close proximity to my window, but I can hear the sky making its infant steps toward day. Cars are waking up. The highway near by yawns out of its silence. At my desk, two candles—one peach, one white—flicker. This morning, they flash a Saturday morning flicker. At the wicks, bright nubs of blue reach into a cuddle of orange and yellow, basking in the knowledge that I will not blow them out after my morning activity of ten minutes of continuous writing has expired—which it did after the word “knowledge.” Instead, the three of us sit, two on the black makeshift desk, one in the alley-whisked chair, and we take our place, engage in our functions in this Saturday morning limitless writing.

And this is what Saturday morning has to say: the black coffee is strong, the roommates have hugged and smiled at each other, Fall has turned, and the leaves will soon loudly change color before they fall into the silence of a slowly descending winter.

This is how it is: we live in these bodies we claim as our own. Yet I have to question, do we really own? Can we claim? What is it that is ours? What is it that I can claim as “me”? We play the part of ourselves, wear the outfits of our skin. We dress ourselves in the idea of ourselves. Try it on for size. Check to see if our ass looks hot it in. When it does, we think we have found the appropriate attire for the idea of ourselves. It is then that we start to claim.

One thing I know for certain: that is bullshit.

We cannot claim, but constantly strive for the idea of ourselves. Or maybe I just haven’t reached that level of zen yet, of being calm and assured of who I am. I almost rarely, and assume I never will feel like I am simply me. Or even a version of me. I don’t even know who “me” is. Even when I’m naked, when stripped of the costume of the everyday, I find myself trying to understand who and what this body is. Even when naked, I am still in performance, playing the part of figuring out and reconciling. I cannot strip myself of that.

And this is when things get tough: when we realize we can never escape our own skin, our own bodies. When we have that realization and know perhaps there is nothing else we can do but claim.

So we are back into the circle, the constant cycle of claiming and stripping. Stripping and claiming.

*

I sit in the center of my wooden bedroom floor, surrounded by brown cardboard boxes of myself, stupidly unlabled. These boxes contain parts of me I thought were important enough to haul across two state lines. I have moved from a large city to a smaller one, hoping to clear the unnecessary parts of my existence in order to find what lies underneath. To funnel myself down to me. And when I unpack one box, when I find the incredibly too-small black hoodie I haven’t worn in three years, I wonder what the hell I was thinking when I decided to bring its old cotton misshapen mass from Chicago to Minneapolis. I sit amidst a tangle of wonder at my decisions. At what moment did I seriously think I would wear the black hoodie decorated with sewn on, ripped off, and jaggedly re-sewn on again anarchist patches? A red image of Emma Goldman holding a bomb in one hand and a condom in the other. A green one with the words Food Not Bombs. A blue raised fist. I don’t even identify as an anarchist anymore. And yet, I once did. So there was a moment when I somehow reasoned that yes, I will shove this now rarely worn piece of clothing into a box and move its weight with me. And so I took it with me, as if in the case had I thrown it away I would have forgotten that at one time I carried a black sheet with a white spray painted anarchist sign on it, and went to protest the war protesters, screaming at them that they were all sheep for believing in the bullshit idea of a democratic government. As if only the fact of this black hoodie would hold the memories of my once disbelief that a supposedly unified body could represent the voice of the people. As if now only the hoodie could remind me that I at one point felt power in the supposed fact that I could be a body representing myself, the unified voice of the Chelsey, for the Chelsey. As if I at one point knew who I was.

I played the part of anarchist, wore the correct hoodie, danced around naked and barefoot in the pouring rain, hollering that no one could control me. I was “me.”

Now, now that I am staring down at this hoodie crumpled in my lap, chuckling at those memories, laughing at myself because just a day ago I seriously thought I could not chuck that torn-up representation of what I at one point thought was me. As if I wouldn’t remember myself without the clothing. And now as I meander through the maze of my thoughts, feel those memories alive in my bones, I realize I can indeed shed the clothes, finally throw away the screen printed patches saved up over those anarchist years, and that my skin, my body remembering, knowing, will always be there. I toss the hoodie in the dumpster out back.

*

August 12, 2011, job interview, 59^th and Nicolett, 10am.

Position: receptionist at an acupuncture clinic. On my resume, I embellished my receptionist experience, bloated it with the language I thought the owner would want to see, and banked on the fact that my dreadlocks would hum to him I was some sort of holistic medicine die-hard who he, of course, could not refuse to hire what with that sort passion and wealth of experience. I am in his small office, the makeshift clinic of house-turned-business, have been brought back from the front desk (small room), through the storage hallway (tiny), to the acupuncture room (too calming in its earth tones). While taking the two-and-a-half strides it took to pass through the hallway, I spot an electric tea kettle. This sets off my sensors. But first, I am sat down in a chair in the small room where all the acupuncture magic happens, being questioned by a skinny man in wire rimmed glasses what my experience has been with answering phones, with holistic medicine. I talk, he nobs with wide eyes and listens. He tells me about the wonders of acupuncture, I nod with wide eyes and listen. I am distracted by the image of the tea kettle. Working here, I realize, would require me to drink tea, not coffee, in order to set an example for the clients. My skin starts to tingle, and it’s not from the acupuncturist’s words as he describes how the tiny needles work on the energy flow of the body. My craving for a cup of coffee zaps through my own body. The need for a cigarette quickly follows suit. Before the interview is even over, before he hires me on the spot, I realize the enormity of the bullshit and ridiculous situation into which I have dragged myself.

And then the dress code is explained: business casual, no jeans, and, as I am gently told by the acupuncturist as he motions towards my nose, no facial piercings. The brown stud in my nose is nothing compared to the large metal hoop I had on earlier in the morning, the hoop I replaced with the stud in order to look more professional. But I am desperate for a job, and so I agree to be hired, to begin training that moment (unpaid, I am later informed).

A question I ask to the woman (the man’s sole employee, soon to be replaced by me) who is in the process of explaining the specifics of my job: what is the policy on tattoos? As I ask this question, I briefly push back my white long sleeves to reveal four of my inkings. And as she says I will have to ask the boss, I laugh in my head as I already know the answer, that there will be a big fat NO to these tattoos., laugh at the thought that if he only knew he was looking at a mere third of my tattoo collection he would quickly escort me out of the office door. The woman tries to stay hopeful for me, tries to convince me that maybe he will say yes, since the tattoos say Resilience and Serenity, since one is of a tree, and one reveals the phrase Human Thing. “Resilience and serenity, after all, are things that we encourage here.” And then I laugh in my head again, laugh at the thought that yeah, you fucking condone the use of needles, but only if they don’t pierce, if they don’t dig too deep in the search for ourselves.

Four hours later, when I finally get home, and after having left the unpaid training five hours earlier than I said I could stay, I strip off my professional looking white button-down collared long-sleeved shirt, light up a cigarette, and say only for myself to hear “Thank fucking god that’s over.” It is at that moment in which I suddenly feel like I have first claimed myself that day. It is 3pm. I go through half a pack of clove cigarettes, half a pack of Camel Lights throughout the rest of the day. I chug coffee, I settle into my own zen-like state.

Can’t I just get paid to be me?

*

This is how we work: by performing. By playing our parts. But who creates the roles? Who says we have to be something other than be ourselves to get paid, to live? Maybe I really am still wearing that anarchist hoodie. Maybe I do believe in the fact that we should be able to simply be ourselves all of the time in this society, that that is what freedom is, that that should be what make us alive, what makes us a living. And maybe if I can’t cut it getting paid for a performance, I’ll have to dive into that dumpster and bring the black hoodie back, find some establishment who will welcome me as the person in which I feel comfortable being. But even then I’ll still just be playing at some part of myself, and a younger part at that. I’ll still be looking in the mirror to see if the idea of me has a good ass. In my second day of sitting amongst a tangle of boxes, digging through what it is I think is me, I have just started to unpack the process, delving into the circle of figuring out who it is I think I am.

I am sitting on the grass, gazing out over the beach and small waves of Lake Mighican. I am with my dog, Athena, and it is the last afternoon I will spend with her before I move from Chicago to Minneapolis. She is lying in the grass, relaxing and panting next to me. The 6pm sun creates long shadows of us, the image of her nose and perked ears and my strands of dreadlocks imprinted on the green in front of us (my clove cigarette sweetening the still air). It is mid-August, and the world considers turning into fall.

I am moving from this city I have come to love in the past five years. The tall buildings of downtown you can see when travelling south on Clark St. near Albion. The train system I finally know without needing to look up my stop when heading toward any location. The feel of Glenwood as I walk or bike to work. Quant houses with their big trees (the dogs leading their humans on leash).

I have grown. Stretched and jumped through the addictions that strangled and wrestled me down. I am new in my healthy body and have started to shed the hard, protective skin that living in a big city created for me. I am ready to slink out of that skin, to wiggle my toes and plant my feet in new soil.

Minneapolis it is. Where every street is bikeable, where the snow stacks up above your waist, where everyone I know  there is gloriously in recovery.

I feel at home in my body, finally, after three years of vacating it (the scars have faded). And now I am ready to inhabit a new, physical space that feels like home to me.

Eight hours away. Minneapolis it is.

(Thanks to Kate Trouble for encouraging me to blog again).

That's not right.

This is a very VERY new piece I’m working on. It’s in a very rough ROUGH draft-y format. Be kind (and helpful!) with the comments.

The body has a language of its own. It speaks. I became obsessed with the dialogue of my body in graduate school. I wanted to see how the body spoke for the vacillating emotions of my mind. I wanted to listen to the movements, to the body that I was not used to hearing. Now, I am interested in the language I place on my body. What do I say to her? What words empower me to move, to act, to feel myself. To feel like myself.

I have yet to discover this language, this power in naming.

I have been thinking about home a lot lately. Never having felt settled in the spaces that were supposed to provide me a home, I turn to what feels familiar: my body. But this body is constantly shifting. It is familiar in its unfamiliarity. It is a body I try to hold close to me, a body I am constantly renaming as mine. I want to find a language to put with my body, to sift into her skin in order to find this home. It feels fitting. If I can find a home in my body, then I will always have my home with me. I can finally settle down and live with me.

Instead of hearing my body, I want my body to hear me. I need her to fit into my language, to open up to the possibilities of what I might want to say. Yes. Move. Go. Accept. These words seem simple. But they are commands. My body will not listen to what I tell her to do. She needs to be encouraged. We need to settle on our dream of a common language in order to understand one another. We need that perfect fit. It’s a matter of imagining, seeking, colliding.

My body feels like a mess. I’ve been avoiding the possible home of my body because of all the clutter. She has been moving in ways I do not feel are my own. Moving to fiercely to allow me to move in. I know I have to figure out how to make it feel as if my body is housing, supporting the situation that is me. Then, perhaps I can start cleaning up the mess. I continue to seek out that language, that poetry of existence. I do not know how this language will feel, but I do not question if it exists. It’s a language I sense lying on my skin.

I am at a used clothing store, browsing. I find a brown sweater. It looks a little misshapen, but I have been on the hunt for this V-neck, soft brown sweater since I pictured it in my head.. I want brown because I imagine it feels calming, bringing my body back to the earth in a way. I want its fabric to soothe, and its V-neck to give it style. So far, this sweater has only existed in my imagination. It has been three months since I dreamed of it. I have yet to find the perfect fit. It is a matter of imagining, seeking, colliding.

I wrestle the brown sweater I have found in this used clothing store over my head. It engulfs me. In the excess of fabric, I get lost trying to find the hole in which to direct my head out. This is not the right fit. The fabric is not soft enough, and I am swimming in its expanse. My skin cannot cling to it in the way I need it to. The space between texture and skin is too big. It makes me itch.

While I am annoyed at yet another failed finding, I am not disappointed. I have become accustomed to things not fitting.

I do not want to settle for anything less than what I want. If I did, it would further shift my body away from itself. If I settled for language too large in its descriptive landscape, too wide to be exact enough to claim as mine and mine only, the words would have too much wiggle room. They would escape. I know I need to keep looking, to continue dreaming about what it is I am searching for. It is a matter of imagining, seeking, colliding.

I return the garment to the silver rack bustling with other once-worn shirts. As my hand moves away from the hangers, I spot another brown sweater. Instead of a solid light brown color, this one has stripes of heather gray and dark mud brown. The V-neck is what I desire, mostly to show off my chest tattoo. To hint at the inked language peeking out from the fabric. The stripes are lively yet focused, and the size looks about right. I decide to give it another go.

I gaze at the striped sweater. Maybe if this one fits right, I can finally feel found in what I imagine I want. I am back in the dressing room. This time, when I wrestle the sweater over my head it is not because I cannot find the neck, but it is to squeeze into the tight cotton weave. I slither my arms into place as the sweater grabs hold tight to my skin. I am suctioned into a space in which the clothes breathe with me. The stripes lift and expand as my lungs lift and expand. I can see the bottom of my rib cage poking out, and I cannot remember when that started happening again. I reside in a shifting body I rarely recognize as my own.

I try to mold into the tight fit of the brown and gray. And while I could be satisfied with it, I still know it does not feel quite right. My body is still not settled. It feels too well wrapped, too well known. My skin needs space to think out loud. To test out its language before it declares and inhabites. To scout out a home before it moves in.

I strip off the striped sweater, and for the third time stand in front of the silver rack still bustling with other once-worn shirts. Discarded memories from other closets. Here I am, a woman gazing at garments given up on by other women—girls grown out of their bodies—wondering if I’ll ever know what the perfect fit and texture of language feels like on my own form.

I leave, knowing I will continue to wonder if I’ll ever be able to find that perfect space, that perfect home, those perfect words. It is a matter of imagining, seeking, colliding.