diso-ball dress
I bought the dress in New York City, on Broome Street. The only time I wore it, a fortune teller on the street told me I had stories to tell, that my life would be full of stories. She said it the way my grandmother used to say I had luck - she never specified if it was good or bad, only that there was so much of it. It makes me feel sweet as honey, but sometimes Im as angry with a serpent tongue. Axe in my mouth and I can't watch where I swing, can’t look away from trouble, but I always want to glitter
silk draw-string top
I fell in love with a good person who, like me, has troubled stars. A hawk's expression and a direct, fluid way of moving that makes them seem a thousand different kinds of easy-going and sometimes a singular kind of dangerous. I fell in love with someone who sees with an artist's eyes. They bought me this silk top, tied a knot I can't bring myself to untie. It was a piece from the same little shop where I got my first lingerie, in Spain, years earlier. A memory from a world away, and there it was in a thrift store on the west coast of the US, on a rainy afternoon. So many little details of life feel impossible, symmetrical and beautiful as butterfly wings
Slip ( a gift )
I unfolded the slip in the bedroom we shared for a few short months - the way I live with my wife, a few short months at a time, we share a bed, a bedroom, a kitchen table. Opening the slip was like opening a little, bright possibility.
The silk was pale, the colour of damp sand, cool to the touch, the crisp feeling of silk that's aged and untouched for a long time. I thought it was beautiful, catching the light in a way that made the whole room lean toward it, hold its breath. Outside the windows, a city was humming with night, but inside between us, there was a private brightness. The note was quick: Wear this when you want to feel me. They underlined brave as if punctuation could be courage. And I smiled and let the silk pass over my hands. It was soft and real, like their touch could be.
I tried it on while they watched. They watched me get undressed. The mirror returned me, softened at the edges by long travel and a slow evening and love, as if silk and their touch smeared every worry into something more gentle. I turned once, slow, discovering a posture I don't remember practising but can always find, relaxed and a little luminous. The slip did something simple to me; it invited pleasure without asking for explanation. They were careful with it; they didn't want it to get hurt. The gesture was ordinary and exact; it sealed whatever they offered as mine
Slip ( a ghost )
I found it between a stack of yellowed postcards and a porcelain pitcher painted with blue flowers and baby deer; it was draped over a blue hanger on the door of a wardrobe, waiting for the light to notice. The silk was pale, the colour of late-winter sunlight, and it moved with a softness that contradicted the roughness of the shop’s floorboards, the land around the half-collapsed barn.
The shop smelled of dust and tea and other people’s pasts, lavender and disintegrating paper. The proprietor, a woman who measured time by the objects she kept, took the slip in her hands and told me she had had it for years but put it out only that day. She knew it was its day, she said. She knew someone was coming for it. I smiled as she showed the place where the strap had torn a little through the lace, a place I would tear more running through the woods in it, catching my hair and skin and silk on bare branches.
That lack of origin felt generous, and her suggestions of fate left room for invention. I held the fabric up to the window. The silk caught the countryside light—fields folding into a horizon, a line of lace
I tried it on that evening in candlelight, which made the room feel small and friendly. In the mirror, I was someone who moved through impossible moments for exact pleasures. The garment softened my shoulders and made me laugh, an outdoor sound. I hang it in the closet where it can catch the pale light. It became a quiet companion: proof that beauty could be found in distance, and things long forgotten, that sometimes a found thing is truer than a given one.
velvet
The city had a late-light clarity, all revel and shine. I loved it instantly.
I found the lingerie shop in a small block of old stores; the buildings grew toward each other as if to share a secret older than the country I call home. The window was arranged with a gentle precision: a lace dress on a mannequin, a stack of postcards, a brass lamp shaped like a swan.
For some reason, I chose velvet. I hate velvet; the texture has always been repulsive to me, even when I like the look of it on other people's dresses, throw pillows, or a winter coat. I can't touch it without shuddering, my skin rolling out in goosebumps. Sometimes, the idea of touching it is enough to make me shiver and gag. But velvet is a fabric that remembers gestures. Someone once said in an article about clothing archives that velvet holds the impression of a hand. The lingerie displayed this as evidence—choice arranged into a set of possibilities, impressed into seaweed-green triangles of bra and panties.
The fabric was cool, repulsive and beautiful. The garments' seams were quiet. The label—simple, unelaborated—suggested a small studio. It's strange how clothing does more than alter form; it edits memory.