Dresses I Will Never Wear Again

The first thing I do in the morning is remove my skin.

My closet is full of old mes. The hangers stick out through the mouths, hold up the shoulders, the empty head falling back flat like a hoodie. I’m used to them, but even so, the teeth are the worst aspect, their ghostly echoes rising up from my flaccid jaws that rest flush against my neck. The teeth look like pearl buttons, snaps on a faux-Western shirt. And with the feet gone—I have to remove them to pull off my skin—I can almost imagine my discarded skins as dresses. Daring dresses, of course, slits going all the way up, but dresses nonetheless. Dresses I will never wear again.

The skins darken over time, losing elasticity until they are more like the clothes I imagine them to be. Every few weeks, I fold and neatly stack what hangs in the closet, and then take the pile up to the attic to store them with the rest.

Why do I keep the skins? I don’t know. It feels wrong to throw away a part of myself.

“But why do you keep them?” my boyfriend asks. His name is Ramsey. We’ve been dating for two months, but it feels like two years, we’re so comfortable with each other. He’s sitting on the bed watching me tug off yesterday’s skin, his eyes glistening with fascination. “You treat them like relics. Like haute couture. But they’re just dead skin.”

“They’re me.” I stretch the just-removed skin between my fingers, my fingers visible as ghosts underneath. I toss the fresh skin onto Ramsey’s lap. “It’s me.”

“It’s still warm,” he says, voice full of wonder, pregnant with awe.

Instead of grabbing a t-shirt, I turn back to Ramsey, feeling frisky. I find him with my discarded face pressed to his lips. His eyes are closed, but the eyeholes on my skin are open, the upper face flopped back over his hand as he nuzzles the warm, unresisting lips.

“What are you doing?”

“What do you mean?” he asks, looking up at me, eyes innocent and deep. My skin falls away from his face.

I lean down and kiss him, then push him back on the bed, run my hands over his body, pull his hands to my hips, breasts, my skin I’m wearing, the me beneath it all. When we’re done and he’s dozing, I get up to take a shower, stepping over yesterday’s skin. It looks up at me from the floor with something like reproach, something like jealousy.

It was me he was kissing, that’s his argument when I prod him over breakfast. Just me, like I’d said myself. He keeps his eyes on the plate. He sops up the syrup with a forked piece of French toast, sticky liquid dripping down his chin as he bites in.

All day at work I think about the look on Ramsey’s face as he kissed my skin. Since we’ve been dating, today’s the first time he’s touched a discarded skin of mine. It feels like a betrayal, his lips on my old flesh, completely empty of everything that makes me me. But that’s overreacting. It’s nothing. I tell myself it’s nothing. I’ve seen the way he looks at other women. What am I worried about? We love each other. He loves me. Isn’t that what this morning means? He loves not just all of me, but all of mes.

When I call during lunch, Ramsey doesn’t answer the phone. I know he’s off work today. I know his plan was to stay at home. There’s nothing to worry about. I am not afraid of infidelity.

I leave the office early and drive the speed limit. In the rear-view mirror, I think I see cracks in my face, but they are just wrinkles. My body is an ill-fit. A tight dress hugging all the wrong places.

At home, I find Ramsey in bed with my skin. It is draped over his naked body like a light blanket, propped up in the middle by his penis. He moans in a way that I react to even now, even at this moment, even as he weaves his fingers in the discarded skin’s hair, makes his hand a fist so the skin draws tight around his knuckles.

Ramsey sees me. He lowers my discarded face from his own, every movement languid, lips swollen with kissing. He’s not embarrassed. He’s not ashamed. I want to rip the skin from him, take it and all the others from the closet, from the attic, and pile them in the backyard and set them on fire.

He holds the skin out to me. His voice is a husk, is a gravel lot beneath a parking car, is a cold icicle running down my spine.

“Put it on.”