The Lives We Wear

The Lives We Wear

 

I have always understood the body as our primary canvas. The first plane we are given, long before we understand what it means to choose. Everything after is simply revision.

The dress isn’t decoration. It’s an argument.

Every morning, we decide which version of ourselves will walk out the door and meet the world. We choose the fabric, the color, the silhouette, each small detail an attempt to reconcile the person we feel ourselves to be with the person we want the world to see.

There’s something innately radical about that choice, particularly in a world that so often makes us feel like spectators to our own lives. Even on the mornings when you feel as though you have inherited yourself rather than chosen yourself, you can still stand before a mirror and begin again.

To get dressed every day is to insist that the self can still be authored.

 

There are 40 million minutes in the average human lifetime.

That statistic is obscene. It has the audacity to take the enormity of being alive and make it quantifiable. To take the improbable fact of our existence and compress it into a number small enough to fit inside a sentence.

And out of those 40 million minutes, you have chosen a few to read my words. The same words I have spent months shaping, hoping they might still feel alive by the time they found you.

There’s something intimate about that. Being here with you when it is just us. In my head, we’re lying in an endless meadow. In yours, we might be sitting on your grandmother’s couch, or at a diner I will never know existed.

I like that we will never know.

Perhaps there is an intimacy in being known incompletely. In the thoughts we let slip, the songs we return to, the scarf we brought home from somewhere far away. In the small, deliberate fragments of ourselves we trust another person to hold.

Maybe that is what being seen really is: choosing which parts of yourself to make visible to another person. It feels faintly like a confession, like handing someone the diary you once swore you would burn.

Perhaps our clothes are another kind of confession. Every morning, we dress for the person we hope to become, unintentionally carrying the mosaic of everyone we have ever been. 

A skirt can preserve a version of yourself you once believed to be the final cut. A dress can return us to a girl we thought we had outgrown. We keep these things long after they have ceased to belong to the lives in which we first wore them, as though letting go of the fabric might mean letting go of the person, too.

Perhaps this is the contradiction of being human: to spend so much of our lives becoming someone new, only to find that we have carried everyone we used to be along with us.

We are never only who we are becoming.

 

We crave change, then grieve what cannot come with us. We say we want peace, but scroll until our brains buzz. We say we want love, then build walls high enough to keep it out. We insist we have moved on, until a particular song comes on and, for a moment, we are sixteen again.

We call it growth, but sometimes it is just grief wearing a prettier outfit. We call it healing, but sometimes it is only a more bearable way to hurt.

Maybe that is all right. Maybe being alive was never about choosing one version of yourself and remaining loyal to her forever. Maybe it’s about making room for all the selves you have ever been. The one who forgives. The one who doesn’t. The one who is still learning how. The one who thought she would be someone else by now.

None of them are any less yours.

Perhaps this is why we keep creating art, dressing for occasions that may never come, keeping photographs of people we no longer speak to, and spending an unreasonable amount of time deciding what to wear on an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday. We are trying to give shape to something that refuses to stay still. To make a life feel like ours while it is still happening.

So we pay attention.

To the people beside us. The clothes we reach for without thinking. An otherwise unremarkable Tuesday afternoon. The dress we wore once and never again, the sweater we kept long after we could explain why. The nights we dressed beautifully for no one in particular.

Perhaps none of it was ever ordinary. Perhaps we only call it that because we have not yet learned what it will mean to remember it.

 

There are 40 million minutes in the average human lifetime, and somewhere among them are the minutes we spend becoming someone, and the minutes we spend missing who we used to be. The minutes that pass without our noticing, and the ones we will spend the rest of our lives trying to return to.

Out of all those minutes, this one is ours. The universe, briefly, becoming aware of itself through you and me. Two people occupying entirely separate worlds, meeting for a moment in the space between a thought and its telling.

We create art because we are going to disappear.

We get dressed because we are still here.

 

-prettybleak