Allure Princess

Wholesale Fashion

I used to smuggle into my parents' doors throughout the day when they were away, at work or running errands or buying groceries or checking up on aunts. I eeled my thin body through the just open door, stretching my small hands over the colorful heaps of shoes, the slippery ropes of ties, the pilled fabric of my daddy's work shirts and the satiny expensive material of my mother's suits, wholesale fashion tumbled in a pile in this unisex mess.

I would stretch around and tug my dad's t-shirts off of hangers with my tiny childish hands, yank the shirts over my neck,  loose and clear right down to my filthy knees, covered with random pockets and strange advertisements. I pretended to be a big person, to be a fancy queen in a lovely robe, to be a dog with a huge nose. My mommy had a kimono, plush and silky between my fingers it would slide off the hanger so that I would pull it around my arms, a enormous length of shimmer trailing behind me like a train.

I daydreamed so determinedly, those times. My own clothing was store-bought, identical polyester and stripes, child clothes, nothing like the different beautiful foreign things my parents possessed. I borrowed their wholesale fashion for my own, adorning myself in their rags like cast-off skins, pretending with a child's passion. I was a penguin, a scallywag, a dancer; I was a worker, a construction worker, a ceo. My brain made no distinction, all seemed equally foreign.

It was just pretending, though. At the close of the day I had to put things back up, smoothing out creases with my shaking hands, and go back to being a girl, dressed in nothing but wholesale fashion.