The button up, or button down, levitates from the body. It leaves space, that inch-wide yet cavernous distance between skin and fabric, that opening on the forearm from which you can see an authoritative jaw, its outline greening as healed ink does.
Unbuttoning is always forgettable; in either a monotonous or adrenaline-filled way. Monotonous like how we don’t remember putting our socks on in the morning, or how I could never recall the amount of shirts I’ve unbuttoned for customers when working in retail. Adrenaline-filled like when the shirt is on someone else, and how almost beside yourself your hands can unbutton and unclasp because of those chemicals that suspend the inhibitions of your brain.
It seems unscientific that I felt perfectly myself in a button up before I’d ever read dissertations on the working class lesbians that made them the costume of the community. This was before I came out and long after they’d died. I remember watching a spoken word piece where the poet said something beautiful about removing a button up to uncover a body. I want to say they called it a magic act. This was before I’d ever written a poem, but I still think about it after my hands perform the magic act.
In the dresses that hang in my closet I’ve left molds of my body, with traceable landmarks of hips and boobs that have settled into skirts and bodices from frequent wear and lack of washing. The button up, or button down, does not chart the body in this way. It’s indiscernible to the eye what happens after it is removed. Perhaps the morphing process it undergoes back into itself is so rapid as to become invisible, but what we can see is that there are no impressions of the torso embedded into the fabric. There is, though, always bunching at the armpit, as if it has forgotten everything but the forearm, from which at certain angles, within that black unmapped distance that separates body and garment, you can see the start of my first cowboy tattoo.