so she's not speaking much, but we were on the topic of wedding wear tonight. d and c informed the guests at large that it was casual. but i just cannot see wearing casual wear to a wedding in which the bride and groom are not going to be casually dressed. it just goes against every grain of my inner diva.
i WANT to shop for some strappy shoes. i WANT to get gussied up and flit around, looking nice. and i definitely WANT to look my best because fifteen years from now when we look back in photo format, i do NOT want to look crappy. i don't want to be wearing jeans that make my ass look huge. i don't want to wear shoes that are sloppy. if there's one area of my life in which i enjoy to excercise control, it's my clothing.
the rest of it...meh. whatever. i can live with a dirty house, with cat that poops outside the litterbox, with my bed on the floor. these are all transitory.
but clothing...clothing makes the person.
i had this totally zen moment yesterday at the grocery store. i guess it was actually monday. close enough. anyway. i'm standing in line and the lady in front of me reaches over to take the receipt from the cashier. in the bend of the cashier's arm, i see a scar.
not a big one. nothing life threatening. but a good two inch long, half inch wide scar. the cashier is blonde, and has slightly tanned skin, but the scar is lighter. not new, an old scar. the memory of something that was painful.
it makes me think of flesh, and how transitory it all is. in the end--you become bones, you go back to the earth, you become earth. the flesh and all its memories and sensations, the marvel of nerves knitted together and functioning--this is all forgotten.
that scar stood out to me. it's all passing. it's all a memory, either waiting to be had, or happening now, or already done. printed, set, finished.
all the way out to the car i thought about that scar. today, while we were discussing the merits of wearing clothing and the different levels of clothing, i thought about that scar--about how it would fade, in time. about how the girl whose arm crooked around it--how she probably could go for days without thinking about that scar and how it formed. it becomes a part of you that is so close you cannot see it.
clothing is transitory too. in the end it all falls apart and you're left standing naked. hopefully in a place that cherishes your nudity, and not in a job interview or somesuch that requires a sense of decency. gravity shreds cotton.
i think about the clothing i have. i think about the scars i have. the memories we attach to bodies and the adornments we put on these bodies. i remember the people who go before me--the bog man, the entombed, the people whose living relatives, whose future, packed them into earth with bits and peices of the lives they lead.
are we so attached to materials? i know that i can be. i enjoy them because they remind me of something i cannot quite put words around: immortality. memories are carried and made immortal only by the people who hold them. once you are gone, those immortal memories are gone too, just like the flesh.
but clothing lives on.
upstairs i have my grandfather's belt. it's a story in and of itself--if i remember correctly he did the tooling in the leather, and it's punched over and over by his awl. you can see when he made it, the size of his waist. and then by the time he passed away, how narrow his hips had become. after i'm gone, the memories of why it's punched so many times will also be gone. i can't write down enough on the back of a belt to sum up the soul i have attached to that long strip of leather.
which makes my grandpa and myself and my memories of him--transitory. passing. a breath in time. someone will use that belt in the future and think of it as theirs. they will give it new memories. eventually it will go back to earth too. but it's life will be a bit longer than mine, it's history more varied.
and makes that belt immortal.
so. in that vein. that makes what i wear on saturday quite relevant.
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