The Dress

Who am I to wear the golden dress and dance with the king?
Torn from the pages of "Leaving my Father's House," a psychoanalytic testimonial of three women assessing their role in the patriarchy, the line is teased from the story Allerleirauh, a tale of thinly disguised incest where a princess wears three gowns to impress the king.

There's a kind of magic at a thrift-store, it's where the good lord sends me my short-term romantic omens. Which is to say, if I can find the dress, I can imagine the date, and from the date will come the love.

And from love will come..

I often leave buying nothing. God won't speak to me.

Or the omen portends loneliness.
It is always just a chance.

The perfect dress and they'll never leave..

It has been the same story again and again this winter.

When I brought up being a deeply flawed human incapable of attracting a long-term relationship, my therapist said, "What if it's not about some deep, unfixable flaw? What if it's about patterns - learned ways of relating and, of protecting yourself, or reacting to closeness? Patterns aren't flaws. They're just grooves we fall into because they feel familiar, even when they don't serve us."

Around this time, in this part of the cycle, I realize I like someone.

And I realize I can't be cute anymore.
I realize I have to be a person, and exist in a third-dimension.

It's that feeling of rounding the curve of the body with your palms, just enough to time to have soaked in some broad and minute details. Enough to time to know you want to stay around awhile, and then the uncertainty that follows that realization.

Asking isn't cute. I've done it twice with bad results.

My therapist will say, "Love isn't just this thing that happens to some and not others, like a lottery. It's a living, growing thing, shaped by connection, timing, and choices of two people. And the fact that you want love - real, enduring love - means you are capable of it. People who are 'too much' for the wrong ones are everything for the right ones."

So I look for the dress. To dance for the king. But moreso, the dress that can shape itself into all the versions of me I hold inside.

We're watching Love is Blind and I start to fast-forward through all the second/third date conversations.

They're so boring.
They're always so boring.

Everyone so shocked another person values God and Family and eating and Nespresso and new patio furniture every summer.

But just now I realized maybe I'm scared of being bored. I'm scared of what comes after getting-to-know, fun facts, caught up on the lore. 

You can never know all the lore.
But sometimes we stop asking questions.

Maybe my fear isn't whether the dress is dynamic enough to attract and soak in, but a fear of when a dress loses it's magic. Maybe I'm afraid of not being magic anymore. Existing third-dimension. An
d god forbid a fourth.

There is this purple dress I haven't worn yet.

It's a spray tan and patio kind of thing. It's cava and oysters and two full of months so maybe in May after stuff has come up and we've gone through, and around and things have gotten a little complicated but we're moving our pawns forward.

Still scheming. The things we've come to love outweigh the fear that once paralyzed us.

And fuck the king, but not the dress.
And god save the person who is willing to dance.

https://open.spotify.com/track/5aS6eku2Klhl8k2VYnE5cd?si=0ba88a9a0ea949d7