I have not met you yet, but I know you’re out there somewhere. You show up in my dreams occasionally, misty and hazy and just out of reach. Sometimes I think I see a glimpse of you on the other side of the street, or in a shop window, or as I get off the bus. You are indistinct but solid somehow, you have weight and meaning. Often when I am looking off into the distance, I am really thinking of you and wondering when our paths will cross.
I think the day I finally meet you will be an ordinary one. I will be shopping on a weekend and will be thumbing through the sale racks when all of a sudden, there you’ll be. You will be black and perfect, like the sky between the stars. Your waistband will settle just under my bellybutton, and your legs will ease over my thighs like a waterfall. Between us there will be wordless synchronicity, the kind of connection that only two individuals deeply in love can have. We’ll leave the store together and everything before that moment will seem like the preamble to my real life, my life with you.
When we go out together you always put me first, with your magical ability to make my legs look long and my ass look hot. You caress my curves and make me smile with pleasure. Eyes will linger, conversations will be prolonged, because the magic we create cannot be denied and everyone wants a piece of that. When I sit down, your waistband will stay in place as if it’s been soldered. When I stand up, you will not need to be tugged or adjusted in any way. Your pockets are deep and secure but unobtrusive and non-bulky. Your boot cut legs are just wide enough to even out my hips and to brush the tops of my shoes in an innocently suggestive manner. With you I feel secure, safe, beautiful.
I will wear you with sandals or boots, sweaters or camisoles, with a belt or without a belt. I will wear you to the Fremont Sunday Market, to work when I have a patient to see, to dinner with my friend from out of town, to the grocery store at ten pm on a run for tea and oatmeal raisin cookies. I will wear you to birthday parties and to the DMV, to the bank and to the job interviews and to the movies and to walk around the lake and on long plane flights and to dance on coffee tables. I will wear you and wear you and wear you, and you won’t ever fade in the wash or shrink unaccountably or highlight my more bulgy areas. Your wrinkles will shake right out even if I leave you balled up in a heap in the laundry hamper. Your construction will have been in a non-sweatshop environment and your seams will be extra strong. Your hems will never fray. Whenever I need you, you’ll be there for me, silent and assured, like the sun every morning, like the breath in and out of my lungs. We will always be together.
Sometimes I get impatient, wondering when you’ll come into my life. I get dissatisfied with all my other pairs of black pants and I get cynical. I get to thinking that maybe I’ll never find you, that it’s not meant to be, that I’ll be stuck in limbo without you forever. I imagine myself getting older, the years slowly ticking by as I go through pair after pair with their gaping waists and twisted cuffs and unforgiving fits, hungering for that indefinable quality that only you possess. In the end, though, comes peace. I know you’re out there. I have to use this time to get ready for you, to open my heart to you, to be the best person I can be so that I will be worthy of you when we are finally united in that santified mystery that can only be understood by those who have been searching for the perfect pair of black pants for their entire adult lives.