Clothes

I had a dream the other day.  I looked in the mirror, and I saw the person that I am not.  So I ran: I ran to a different place, a different city, all while taking off my clothes.  Then, I looked in a different mirror, and I saw my naked body, the body that I am not.  Once again, I ran to a different place, a different city.  I put on clothes along the way, clothes that I thought would make me beautiful, clothes that fit the person that I am.  Fully dressed, I looked in the mirror (the same mirror my dream started with). Fully dressed, I still saw my body, I saw it on my clothes.  So I ran again, taking my clothes off, hoping that once I remove them, they will no longer lie, that I will just be me.  But, when I reached that second mirror it was just my body in the reflection, and my body wasn't me.  And so I ran, and the dream continued in a loop, a cycle, a trap with no escape.

"….So dirty laundry makes me think of clothes and closets.  Clothes to cover up gendered bodies and closets to hide them in."  -- Masculine Femininities Zine, Issue 3

There's no story to this blog.  No rhyme or reason, no transitions.  What I say next has nothing to do with what I said last.  I've just been thinking about clothes lately.

There was a time in my life when I used to smoke a lot of pot.  Back then, I sometimes asked myself: of the clothes I am wearing, which have I smoked pot in?  Almost every day, without fail, I had smoked in every single item of clothing on my body, down to the undergarments.  How quickly that changed once I stopped smoking!  I still play this game every once in a while, I ask myself: which of  these clothes have I smoked pot in?  It's never every item of clothing.  Most of them are "no"s.  But, almost every time there's at least one "yes", one shoe or shirt or bra that carries the past.  So quickly it changes, so much it remains; the person we are and the person we used to be, reflected, as if on a mirror, on the clothes we wear.

Which of these clothes did I question myself in?  Which did I pause before putting on, wondering what they'll imply about myself, about my identity, about the person that I am and that I am not, the person that I want to be?

Last night, another dream about clothes.  A dream of a time and place where a boy wore a skirt, a beautiful yellow and red tie-dye skirt, and I almost didn't even notice, because it was normal.  I can haz that world?