The fabric is in my stash, folded in an acid-free sleeve inside a flat box on the shelf next to the wedding dress box. It will wait until I know what it should be. In the meantime, it is there: potential, specific, mine.
This is also what I want the future of my family to be: potential, specific, mine to navigate. Not a resolved thing, not a fixed arrival point, but a fabric in a box, waiting for the right pattern.
I am patient. I know how to wait for the design to become clear before I cut.
## The Longer History of the Dress in My Head
I want to tell you something that I have not told anyone except Ben, because it is slightly embarrassing in its earnestness and I have not been able to figure out how to say it without it sounding like more than it is.
I designed the dress before I met Ben. Not precisely — I didn’t have a sketch, I didn’t have a pattern block, nothing that could be called a plan. I had an image in my head: a column of silk, botanical embroidery at the wrists, a detachable overskirt that would change the silhouette for dancing. I held this image loosely and for a long time, through years of work and dating and apartment moves and the ordinary accumulation of a life.
When Ben and I got serious, the image in my head started to resolve. When he proposed, I knew what dress I was going to make before he had finished asking.