Feeling It

I am actively trying not to cut off my hair with the tiny pair of scissors folded into my pocketknife. Today I went with Brittani to the mall in Heliopolis so that she could buy some clothes for her trip to Syria. None of us brought a lot of clothes to Egypt with us, especially not clothes we would normally wear wherever we came from. In fact, I gave most of my clothes (consisting almost entirely of very short or very sheer dresses and skirts, high-waisted skinny jeans, and deep-cut V-neck t-shirts from American Apparel and Uniqlo) to MG and Maud before I left in August. The night that Maud left to go back to New York City after coming down to my parent’s house for a beach daytrip, Chris and I were lying in my tiny bed in the pink bat cave and I started crying. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “I miss my clothes,” I said. This is a true story. I mean, I wasn’t crying a lot or anything.

I don’t want to live somewhere where I can’t wear a mini-skirt. I’m not saying this as a matter of principle, here “not being able to wear a miniskirt” standing in for “not being able to walk down the street alone at night” or “not making it through the day without being hissed at or cat-called even when I am wearing three layers of loose clothing.” I’m saying this because there was a miniskirt at the H&M in the mall that made me extremely homesick for fall in New York and moccasin boots and wool tights. At risk of feeling shallow (and honestly isn't that what the fear of "sounding shallow" is really about?), I will admit that am someone who cares about Fashion. This isn't much of an admission, obviously, if you already know me but if I don't tacitly admit to it, the following might sound like an elaborately-constructed denial of caring-about-clothes. And I don't deny that. I care about clothes.

At the same time, what I actually wear is only partly dictated by what I see in magazines and also partly about Feeling It, just like constantly cutting and dying my hair is about Feeling It. Getting dressed is sometimes more about putting feelings on the outside of your body than anything else, in a code that you simultaneously think everyone else will understand and realize they won't, because they are probably thinking, “That is an ugly shirt,” instead of “That shirt is from when she was in high school, so today she is trying to channel the feeling of the past pure, which is the feeling of okayness.” It’s about looking in the mirror and saying, “I am someone who wears this,” because “this” has a particular meaning to you that you would like to simultaneously signify to others and envelope yourself in, and that meaning is a synthesis of the meanings you attribute to what you see in magazines and on TV and on the street (“Fashion”) and the meanings attached to certain things by dominant popular culture (certain colors equal certain moods, short skirts are slutty, et cetera) and the meanings things have in your deep-down free-association personal aesthetic code (“this sweater makes me feel nostalgic for late summer/early fall and for my family because it looks like one of sweaters I bought in the basement of a laundromat in Vermont the summer before my Aunt Theresa died and the feeling of nostalgia is a reference to the past pure and I would like to walk around all day wrapped in that”). Most of the time, I am someone who wears a black t-shirt with a black cardigan and black jeans and moccasins with holes in the soles and I am someone who wants the Universe to leave me the Fuck Alone. Black shirt/black cardigan/black jeans is my Cosmic Deflection uniform.

(A brief word on the past pure self: I recognize that this is a category of self that has been retroactively created. In high school, I also was constantly trying to seek and derive and create meaning in everything, figure-out-it-all-and-me. It’s not like I walked around thinking, ‘Right now I am okay.’ It’s more like, when I think back to high school, I was doing more of what I wanted to be doing and was with who I wanted to be with more of the time, and I definitely wore whatever I wanted because we were the “weird” “artsy” kids anyway. I wasn’t allowed by my mother to compose an outfit to wear to any sort of family gathering or any other place that required me to look presentable until well into college.)

And here, not only do I feel isolated, but I feel alienated from my clothes, which is, in a way, being alienated from Feeling It, which is, in its essence, the Cosmic Abyss. X=Y=Z=0.