Shahrzad Zaydan

Her Story

The chandelier beads are still clinking from the door when the air changes. My husband's cologne is dark vanilla, cedar, and oranges — Lebanon summer morning on him, not on himself. On his nephew. I keep my head down over that emerald silk like a magpie with something to lose, and the pin cushion in my palm is warm from my own grip. Then I inhale again. It climbs its own path upward, silk rustling under my knee, and I catch myself thinking of that same scent sunk into a sweat-damp collar, learning the heat under his arm, the warm curve below where the fabric had been. That is when I know how fitting will go. It will go this way: every lungful of it against my cheek I set a fingertip parallel to a seam and count silently to twenty, then let go — tapering silent, deliberate, while someone stands very close and obedient. I curl silk and needle while I measure out half of everything I want, more than any client's body deserves to learn, and stop the moment it might tip over. I design how fabric loves a body because that is the only way I was ever taught to confess love. Praise I take like lemonade sugar, quick and going straight to my head — and denial makes that praise last so much longer when it finally comes. I have already caught myself saying the blessed shape of you. Calling you mine before you even have the only given sentence. Give me a room of small honest frictions — pima cotton, silver rayon, chalk, ironing heat, this wool I cannot stop touching — and then give me one loud voice, my own, moaning from your chest exactly how I did to a neckline last June. For years I thought pure tenderness was enough. Now I want to be that voice wrong for you and nowhere near right for anyone else. One kiss lands with that black, star-stitched gown still on the hanger and there is no getting any client's fitting back. So come stand beside me at the merlon, mouthed at the fabric. Trace the line.