Cashmere

 I was asked to write down what it would feel like to wrap myself up in cashmere instead of protection like I normally do.  Every time I try to write it down I go blank.  

I don’t know what cashmere feels like. Not in a relationship. Not in life. I’ve never been gifted cashmere. I’ve never been gifted that sensuous soft embrace of trust and been held with luxurious care. I’ve never been cherished consistently and protected as priceless and held that way.  I’ve had glimpses of it, brushed my hand against it, and sometimes even had that softness caress my cheek and kiss the back of my neck, just behind my ear.  I’ve seen what I thought was it, reached for it, even worn it - later to find I’d been duped by a fake. The kind that has just enough cashmere to not be outright false but mixed with enough scratchy wool and nylon to disappoint and become itchy at the first sign of heat or sweat from a brisk walk  or exertion.  I’ve worn the sweaters of hope and effort and even commitment and work - just to have it torn to pieces with every stitch of my soul shredded by the sharpened saber of another’s inner wounds. 

I know disappointment. I know how it feels to filter everything through the wounded eyes of betrayal and pain. What I’m not sure of right now is what it feels like to let it all go. To stop trying on the scratchy sweaters others hand me from their wounded past and instead paint myself in perfumes of sweet vanilla and fragrant jasmine, covering my soul with the softest embrace of meticulously hand selected fibers of love, connected by the steady hum of softly clicking knitting needles from the sweetest grandmother whose heart has aged but whose love grew stronger, shored up by the wrinkles of time. 

I’m not sure what it feels like to dress myself in robes of silk in front of mirrors reflecting the infinite beauty of who I am, tenderly caring for me.  I am beauty. I am love. I know it. I trust myself in it, but I am seeing how I haven’t carried myself in it, bathed in it, or wrapped myself up in the scent of it regardless of what paths cross mine each day.

I think I’ve had it twisted somewhere that if I live a life like that, it also means I live in naivety of life without pain, challenges, or sadness.  That a life wrapped in silk and cashmere only exists in blown glass bubble, and since I am not the princess in a fairytale that it really isn’t the life for me. 

But I am the center of the fairytale I create in my mind, regardless whether it is a life lived in clouds of bliss or - as I have currently painted it - filled it with more nonsensical creatures, terrible ogres and twisted lies and betrayal from a prince with a broken heart and whose self betrayal holds him back from holding me in cashmere every day.  I think he sees me as the spiny beast in this sad tale more often than the warrior princess wrapped in shrouds of chain mail and weighed down by the heaviness or the protection she carries, which is more often than not the way I dress myself. Or equally as often, I drape myself in robes of sadness with ash marked brows of haunting pain and shards of broken dreams strewn on the floor around me, feeling trapped, broken and unseen. 

I am neither fairy princess or haunted ghoul.  I am me. And it’s time to wrap me up in the copious amounts of love and care that is within me, savoring the scent of jasmine on the wind, letting my skin soak in the warmth of the sun that surround me when I step out of the concrete walls that have held me safe for so long. 

I can say it - but now, I get to be well practiced in it.  No matter what the price whether charming or foe is being around me. 

So to sum up this exercise of cashmere instead of protection - this is what I see.   That every day I get to embrace me, wrap myself up in the love and care and cherishing that I long for outside of me, hold myself with tenderness and sweet embrace while being authentically and vulnerably me. Trusting myself, holding myself, and staying vulnerable without fear. Letting all the fear go is a stretch because I see how knowing what to fear, what to avoid has kept me safe for so long. But I am no longer a child hiding from her Dad. I am no longer a teenager being disowned for having a voice that said no. I am no longer a woman being used or abused. I am no longer without an army of love around me from people who see me.  I am oceans of complexity and simple simultaneously.  I am love. I am me.