If This Little Black Dress Could Talk: Understanding the Human Experience.
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If this little black dress could talk, she would tell you that she knows what it’s like to be human after all the times her soft cotton and sultry mesh have caressed my skin in the midst of my life’s chaos.
She would tell you how I gravitated to her every time I stood naked in my closet, unsure of what to wear during those colossal events in my life. She could describe the ways that she saved me from shriveling up under my sheets to hide from the turmoil of events I’ve both chosen and been thrown into.
She would start by telling you about the more frivolous events, which felt like giant monsters of anxiety in my world at the time.
Those brief moments when I was intimidated by the evening’s date to the point where my hands would shake as I tried to zip myself before heading out to meet a potential suitor for dinner.
She could tell you about how she never winced when my heart pounded with nervousness as I made eye contact with the man sitting across from me.
She would continue on with the arbitrary stories, before explaining the truly life-changing, heart-rending, monumental moments of my life. Those shallow times her cotton almost drowned in alcohol when I put her on to go to a fancy nightclub with a bunch of people I thought I cared to impress.
The way I thought I could hide behind her, but ended up with the bitter taste of disappointment and too much liquor in my mouth.
Once she gained your trust with such surface-level stories, she would carry on to describe the time she graced my skin and held me tight when my voice quivered as I gave my father’s memorial speech at the funeral home — the way my heart broke with every word I muttered, but her stitching never faltered.
She would explain the way she hid my blackened mascara tears in the confines of her dark cotton as the reality of never seeing my father again slowly hit me in that room full of people I barely knew.
Then she would reminisce on the pride she witnessed exuberated from my father when he was still alive — when he watched me wear her as I walked across the stage to receive my Bachelors degree.
She would tell you how close our family had become in that moment and how unexpected his death was just a few months later. She could describe how she, too, always saw the sadness hidden behind my father’s mysterious green eyes in even those happy, prideful moments.
She would continue telling my life story and try to end on a happy note, how I put her on again in Vegas when my mother got remarried and I learned how to accept new beginnings.
While this was a very different and happy occasion than that of the funeral, she would still be able to detail the white noise of pain that lingered in the background from the loss of my father a few years prior.
She would tell you that she finally understood the human experience that day: how it’s possible to feel immense amounts of joy with the dull pain of heartache lingering in the background, how beautiful it is to be able to feel and express such a large array of emotions.
She would confess that she’s scared I’ll one day outgrow her, that her cotton may fade and her stitching might tear. I hope she knows I could never throw her away. She is a physical documentation of the events I’ve survived and emotions I’ve embraced.
She reminds me what it means to be human every time I put her on.
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Jacki Moon is a writer, dreamer and yogi with a rebel soul who currently resides in Colorful Colorado. While she has been a writer for as far back as her memories go, she began taking the craft more seriously in her undergrad years when she got into music journalism. Her ‘Almost Famous’ dreams and hopeless romantic spirit have taken her on many adventures across the nation, and have opened her heart to a love affair with the unknown. She invites you to join her on Twitter to keep up with all of her crazy antics.
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