It also looks like: if you have a permission to give, give it in writing, be specific about what it covers, and do not extend it to cover things that weren’t asked about. ‘She can look at it’ does not mean ‘she can have it.’ The difference is not a legal technicality. It is the difference between what I said and what my mother told Elise I said.
And it looks like: if you are the person who tends to be okay and tends to come around, it is worth occasionally being clear about what you are actually okay with and what you are not. Not because you owe anyone a complete accounting of your feelings at all times. But because the alternative — being legible only in your silence, comprehensible only in your willingness to absorb — is not actually communication. It is an absence that other people will fill in with whatever is convenient for them.
I had been an absence, in certain ways, in my family for years. The dress forced me to become a presence. That is what I am trying to stay.
## The Fabric in My Stash
I mentioned that I used some of the restoration money to buy fabric. I want to end here, in a small domestic detail, because I think it tells you something true about how I am.
The fabric is a wool crepe, charcoal gray, substantial and matte, with a drape that is different from silk but shares its quality of movement — the way it responds to a body, the way it catches light without glinting. I don’t have a pattern for it yet. I have ideas, sketches, half-formed notions. None of them is urgent.