The green dress

365 days ago you gave me a four leaf clover because you said it matched my green dress. A dress I bought to wear to Paris for a trip that never happened. I twirled the stem between my fingers, smiling, then carefully slipping the gift between the pages of a cherished book to keep forever, to remember you thinking of me and my green dress that day. I couldn’t wait to tuck it away on a shelf being the only one to know it’s there. A souvenir of that last day last March.

I was the last to leave the restaurant. We hugged. I lingered a little longer and knew it would be the last moment like it for a while. I didn’t know how long a while would be. I didn’t know how drastically different things would become. None of us did. I would have hugged you all a little tighter if so.

I wore the green dress a lot in the beginning. It made me feel hopeful in the uncertainty. It made me daydream of springtime in Paris and getting there someday. Even with nowhere to go I wore the dress, especially then. On the lonely days I wore it, and there were a lot of them. As the days dragged into weeks and weeks dragged into months hope seemed distant like the distance to Paris.

The green dress ended up in a pile on my closet floor with the other clothes I wasn’t wearing to the places I wasn’t going. I put on sweatpants instead. It remained there. My favorite green dress. Crumpled up in the corner, forgotten about for a long time. I couldn’t find the energy to dig through the pile. Or the energy to do a lot of things really. And now we’re here. A year later. 365 days since you gave me that four leaf clover. I thought about your kindness that day, about Paris, and my green dress. I needed to find it. I went to my closet digging through the pile until I found it there. Clover green, wrinkled on the floor. It didn’t deserve to be there like that. I cried. I felt like that pile of clothes. Wrinkled on the floor, forgotten about too. So I grabbed my favorite dress that I had bought for another time in what felt like another life and realized I needed it now just as I needed it then. I slipped it on and as I did I thought about hope again. 🍀