The Red Dress

I put it on in the bedroom with the door closed even though there was nobody to close it against. Old habits.

The red dress. The one I bought years ago and wore once and then put in the back of the wardrobe because “you’re wearing that?” was easier to avoid than to answer.

It still fit. Which felt like a miracle because nothing about my body felt like mine and finding out it could still inhabit something beautiful was information I didn’t know I needed.

I stood in front of the mirror. Full length. Something I hadn’t done voluntarily in years. Because mirrors were where his voice lived. The voice that said I wasn’t attractive any more. The voice that had opinions about my waist and my thighs and whether I should really be eating that.

His voice was quiet that day. Not gone. Just quiet. Like it knew this moment was mine and even cruelty has manners sometimes.

I looked at myself.

Not at the bits I usually avoid. Not at the stomach or the arms or the things that Instagram says should be different. At the whole thing. The full, standing, breathing, red-dress-wearing whole of me.

And I didn’t feel beautiful. Let’s not pretend this is that story. I felt something smaller. Something more important. I felt present. In my body. In the room. In the red dress that used to live in the dark because a man decided it attracted the wrong kind of attention.

The wrong kind of attention. His phrase. As if my body existing in colour was a provocation. As if being visible was something I should apologise for.

I wore it out. To the shops. To pick up milk. Nothing dramatic. But I wore it out and nobody told me to change and nobody looked at me with that look that said you’d be better in something else and the air didn’t change when I walked into the room.

It was just a dress. Red. From the back of a wardrobe. On a body that’s been through things I haven’t finished writing about.

But putting it on felt like defiance. And defiance, even small, even quiet, even just to Tesco, is still defiance.

The red dress is not in the back of the wardrobe any more. It’s on the hook on the bedroom door where I can see it every morning.

Not because I wear it every day. Because I need to know it’s there. Available. Mine.

Like everything else should have been all along.