just hope and underwear

Never, ever pack a suitcase filled with doubt, no matter how you want to fold tightly and zip and keep safe. Doubt has no place in your travels.

I'm changed by this book. Best read in years. Can't stop reading it, and don't want to finish.

Go read it. Quick.

Holes: a love story

I am the girl with holes in her stockings.

We have money. My family isn’t poor. I don’t think we are rich either, but I know we pay the bills and eat good food and have presents at Christmas.

“Put your tights on this way,” my mom instructs.

I watch her scrunch down one leg with both hands, thumbs wild with grace. She shimmies fast down the tube and arrives at the toe in seconds. Maybe nanoseconds. She places her pointed foot in one, smoothing and pulling until it’s around her ankle. There is more delicacy in this action than I can describe and it frustrates me just thinking about it.

“Then take the other leg and do the same thing before pulling any more of the stocking up.”

I watch and listen and think it’s funny how she goes from calling them stockings to tights, but because she has always done this, and because I just learned about synonyms and how it’s fun to call something by more than one name, I do the same thing.

I try to copy. Always I try. But the tights are tight and my legs seem to fight them and my hands are not at all graceful when pulling them up. By the time the tights are on and around my stomach, there is a hole in the thigh. Or at the toe. And I haven’t even walked out the door yet. I’ve yet to skip and fall and scratch my knees.

Usually the holes are in places easy to cover. Still they are uncomfortable and sort of itch. Like the skin poking out is breathing and teasing the rest of the leg.

“Ha-ha-ha. We are out and you are not.”

Which makes me even more agitated. I have spots of leg that are mean. Soon I will cry feeling the holes and the scratch and knowing I am not talented enough to scrunch up legs of stockings when I get dressed.

But it is cold and I like skirts and so I wear them. Once. Until my mom buys me more which I will wear again, once. Until I am older and live in a fourth-story apartment on my own and when I wear tights and create a hole, I simply use fingernail polish to stop the run and head to the department store the next day. Or I live in a place that is warm and because I didn’t fall very much my knees are beautiful and I never wear tights again.

Until then, I am that girl with holes in her stockings.

MBA

"Everything I know about business, I think I learned from taking copious notes while watching marathons of "Brothers and Sisters" on Netflix, all the while knitting repetitive patterns to let the information sink in," she said while showing off her new winter scarf which hung to her knees.