HAY WOW, it’s June. I just had to say that.

So, it’s warming up around this joint and I am busting out the tiny clothes.

I seem to be traveling in reverse, somehow. I think that when you’re young you’re supposed to wear the ho clothes, and then as you get older you’re supposed to get more respectable somehow, and grow some dignity, and buy some culottes or whatever. Especially post-spawning.

When I was nineteen I moved to Phoenix and lived there for three years. I had a whitey-white friend like me who was always hiding from the sun as well. We used to take the long way wherever we went at school so we could skim the edges of buildings and walls in order to take advantage of the shade there. I was a fairly religious applier or sunscreen and wore ballcaps and sunglasses. I wore long shorts cut off at the knee and voluminous rock tee shirts. My technique for beating the heat was to go the route of loose clothes that didn’t cling.

Of course, the side effect of this was that I looked like a slightly raggedy frat boy, especially since I cut all my hair off when I moved there. I look at pictures of myself at twenty and I realize I have seen cuter catheters. Depresso. I told myself I was being sensible in the face of really punishing weather, but I look back and realize I was hiding myself, too.

As I got a little older I got more daring and moved into slight v-neck territory. OOH! I guess this is indecent exposure for the Victorians or the Amish. I have also been assiduously moisturizing my face and neck since I was about twenty-three. It only made sense, somehow. It was a preventive measure. What was I waiting for? My modeling career that would kick in suddenly at fifty because I looked younger than everyone else that age? I don’t know.

I remember a conversation I had with my ex-husband about four years ago. I was probably, at that moment, wearing too-large mens’ jeans and some shirt that would be at home in the one dolla barrel at the Army-Navy Surplus. This was shortly before I temporarily and necessarily lost my nut and did things like writing blog letters to celebrities. (Something I have vowed to give up entirely, Britney Spears being the sole exception.)

“You know,” I said. I was probably examining my pores in the mirror at the same time. “I think my thirties are going to be my decade. I think that’s when I’m going to come into my looks.”

“What?” he said.

He never understood anything I said or what it meant, and that goes double for the things I wrote. Sometimes back in the day when I was in Earnest Angsty Watch-Out-I-Am-Expressing-Myself-Here Blogger mode I would sit him down and make him read and he would say, “I have no idea what any of this means.” I probably should have married someone who spoke only Portuguese, because then we would never had to have conversations like that and we could just hump all the time.

FURTHERMORE. If I could write a thirty-second play of our relationship, it would involve me saying something long and slightly stupid, and feeling self-conscious about it, but meaning well, and I knew what I meant, goddamn it. And it would all end with him screwing up his eyes at me and tilting his head and going “what?” as if I had just said something like, “Gee, these lobsters in my pants are getting mighty uncomfy! How they fidget and cavort.” This is assuming he was listening and not watching the baseball.

I look back on that moment four years ago, and I think that not even I knew what I meant, about coming into my looks. But something else has happened in the intervening time. I have stopped caring that my legs look kind of like a freshly-plucked chicken and that I am covered with scars. I thought maybe I would creep forward into that transcendent rhapsody zone that celebrities whose pictures have undergone hours of protoshopping seem to inhabit: the I LOOOVE MY Body place.

I have discovered that I like wearing smaller clothes. They are comfortable, and more feminine, and I don’t rustle when I walk like I used to. And I don’t LOOOOVE my body and I am really stating not to care. It’s a weird body, but a good body. Most of the time it doesn’t hurt, especially when I keep up on the yoga.

For a long time I beat myself up because I didn’t love my body, which is the contradictory and false message women often get spewed at them. But I am now friends with my body, and I am used to it. I don’t want a different one. I would miss waking up and tracing my weird network of scars and seeing my plucky chicky legs. It’s mine. I’m keeping it. And now I am going to start inflicting it on other people, instead of covering it up all the time like it’s unfit to be looked upon.