it was a windstorm so ferocious it kept my ups man indoors.

i bet he drank lemonade and watched springer while i was struggling with my Skirt, pink, full— far too flirtatious for the weather.

it’s a delicate dance, this “trying to keep one’s skirt down during a windstorm,” requiring a complicated maneuvering of one’s appendages. i’d employed the casual “pull and twist” method, which involves yanking the skirt in such a way that the excess fabric can’t fly free. this method works, of course, only when one has both hands free— one to carry the bag, one to tame said naughty skirt.

then, of course, it started to rain.

i was a woman possessed, searching frantically through my bag for an umbrella, a magazine, a SOMETHING to shield me from the imminent monsoon and just then, in those few precious moments, it happened:

my left hand, undefeated in twenty-three tumultuous years of skirt-taming, reached up to help my right one.

i let go.

i was enveloped in PINK, temporarily blinded by the thick magenta fabric of Skirt flying dramatically up over head. i felt the rain drip into my bellybutton as i stood there, frozen, my polka-dotted panties and bare ass exposed to all of seventh avenue. seventh avenue which promptly, unapologetically burst into applause.
 
everyone.
construction workers, men in suits, women pushing babies in strollers, the babies themselves… the world stopped for a moment and they were applauding. happy to be outside of themselves, happy it hadn’t happened to them, happy someone had given them a reason to… pause…on that dreary tuesday, somewhere in the middle of new york city, sometime in the middle of spring, in the middle of the afternoon.

my underwear did that.
imagine what the rest of me is capable of.