the dress
(Today’s image brought to you by Hiller Goodspeed, who gets it.)
I am writing this newsletter from my bed, in a dress that is at least two sizes too big for me. Black knit, half-sleeves, boat neck. It is fantastically unflattering. The bust doesn’t fit nearly as closely as it needs to, so while there’s an attempt at a waistline happening in my silhouette, it’s happening several inches out from my actual torso. If it were the right size then the skirt would graze my knees, but it’s hitting at about mid-calf, in actuality; between that and the excess width, I look both broader and shorter than I actually am. I am essentially walking around in a sleeved tent.
I bought it for work, in a fit of idealism several months ago. I realised immediately on trying it on, after it arrived, that it didn’t fit. I then proceeded to executive-dysfunction myself out of sorting out a return, which meant that despite my best intentions, I became the permanent custodian of a dress I couldn’t wear out of the flat. I put it somewhere safe, which meant it slipped through the net of my wardrobe purge in the halcyon days of February, only to reappear after I’d already hauled two overfull bags down the road to the charity shop. I sighed, and I put it back where I’d found it. Perhaps it would come in useful as a loafing garment, I told myself, and did not think about it again until this morning, in the middle of a plague.
Getting dressed every morning, even when you can’t go outside, is good advice. I have, no joke, given that advice to other people before now. Unfortunately, I am comedically bad at actually taking the advice myself. I’ve been in pain (non-corona! I must stress!) for the past two days, and my pyjamas are comfortably stretchy, and the nebulous flesh-ache has tanked my mental health thoroughly enough that getting out of bed is a terrible hardship. Sure, putting on human clothes might help me to feel more like a person — but it equally might add more discomfort, or reaffirm to me that I’m failing to live up to the necessary human performance. After a certain point of inhuman feeling, it’s not really worth the gamble.
Except that this morning, after standing for a solid thirty minutes under the hot water in the shower, I put on the dress.
Readers, friends, comrades: the dress is the most comfortable thing I have worn in my life. It is barely clothes. I hardly experience it as fabric at all, on account of how it barely touches my flesh. And yet — it is a dress, and it is vaguely constructed, and it is objectively not pyjamas. Which means I feel as though I’ve managed to get dressed.
I don’t necessarily believe that things happen for a reason. While it is comforting to imagine an ordered universe, it’s not an idea on which I have ever managed to sell myself wholeheartedly. (I occasionally volunteer my services as a reader at the college’s chapel services, which — at least for me — entails saying some very beautiful Bible excerpts, sitting quietly for the rest of the service, and thinking ‘man, must be nice’ while everyone else is praying.) But it is making me feel better today to believe in this one small coincidence: the dress did not have to remain in my flat, and yet it did. If I had been less preoccupied with ‘eating regular meals’ or ‘rewriting my whole book,’ I might have returned the dress, and I might have missed out on this small yet crucial (and comfortable) joy. We are all fucked, and we are all saved, by our own shortcomings every day of our lives. Nobody will ever see me in this dress, but it is part of my life now, and it will remain thus until I wear it out.
Find your dress, whatever it is. Perhaps you already have one lying around somewhere: just think back to however you screwed yourself over in the months preceding lockdown, and adapt.
W