A Name The Wind Knows

The dresses on the rack were never mine. Their seams whispered secrets I couldn’t keep, stitched for girls who walked like petals in the breeze, who folded themselves small enough to disappear. I was never small. Never light. Never unseen. They spoke my name before I ever did, rolled it between their teeth like a prayer, or a curse, or a rumor too sweet to let die. I heard it in mouths I never met, saw it scrawled in air, in whispers, in glances that burned like fingerprints left too long in the sun. They knew me before I knew myself— or thought they did. Shaped me in their stories, carved me from want, from sin, from something softer than I was. And I stood there, heavy-limbed, full-formed, in a body the world had already claimed. They called it a gift. A spectacle. A sin. A thing to be wanted and feared, a shape that belonged to the hands of strangers long before it belonged to me. Laughter echoes behind me, just out of reach, a sound dressed in my name. They say it like I belong to them, like I am something that can be held without ever being touched. And I wonder— what does it feel like to be unknown? To step into a room and bring only yourself, not a story already written in hungry mouths? To be weightless, nameless, free? The dresses on the rack will never be mine. Their seams are too fragile, and I have always been too much.