rose
about a dozen years ago, in a college writing class where i shot my shot at being funny, i wrote a piece that is now minorly infamous in my friend group called ‘hana getting dressed’, in which my friend hana attempts to get dressed for a night out, and i pontificate on the banality of our predictable lives on our tiny college campus and the spice girls. too much of the spice girls. like one of my notes from workshopping the piece in class is ‘less spice girls’. many hair colors, breakups, familial health scares, and rewatches of sex and the city later, the current iteration of hana stayed with the current iteration of me this weekend, her presence enveloping me in this tender time of transition like the extremely pilled wesleyan fleece that i don’t wear but will never give away because it was my grandfathers.
we have been many, many people to the world since our friendship spawned on the way to the campus film series – at one point, hana was bald because she shaved her head in a music video. at another, nearly everything i owned was black – but always the same to each other. we’ve tried on so many versions of ourselves and ended up sitting on the iron steps of an extremely expensive soho consignment store talking about the nothing that is everything, the same way we used to do on our college quad or any of the crown heights/bed stuy/park slope/echo park/prospect heights apartments we’ve flitted in and out of since then. i styled hana in my clothes until she found the person that she wanted to be for the night in an oversized distressed t-shirt and baggy vintage jeans, and held her tiny hand as we walked to the bar. there are piles in my closet of selves she rejected and i rejected, and i will put them away in due time. she is a sometimes hurricane and i am a sometimes hurricane and we clean up after each other every time because that is what friends who are family are for.
i don’t think you can never really know what you want, but you need someone who will love you unconditionally as you try on everything that you need to find out for yourself is not for you. love is unconditional cheerleading, the weight in the windstorm. to hana, and all those who anchor me, i love you in ways that are effusive and unyielding, and am fiercely grateful for the unbounded space you have given me to run off of every cliff i can find.
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a version of Hana Getting Dressed: a Play in One Act, is below for your amusement, and bemusement. it has been edited to contain fewer spice girls.
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It’s late Saturday evening at the liberal arts school I feel guilty about how many loans my parents took out to pay for, which in my group of friends is a quagmire of do I attempt to do reading after dinner or do I punt on doing absolutely anything productive today? Usually I’ll settle at the fifteen-yard line and go to a movie. I wish I was a film major but I’m not.
By nine, our friend Grace, whom I can only accurately describe as a ‘muppet’, has already put together an outfit consisting of various pieces from my wardrobe and something with cats on it. The number of times that girl has managed to go out wearing cat sweaters and still get laid is commendable. I’m systematically rotating my sheer black tops with the season. It’s late March, which means it’s time for the three quarter length sleeved one. The three quarter length sleeved one is really only applicable during March and November. It was an impulse buy.
Hana shows up wearing a black and red paisley tank top that looks like it could be lingerie. She tells us she stole it from her mom. I really hope it’s not lingerie. She’s paired it with the tight black skirt from H&M that we all bought when we were seventeen because it screamed COLLEGE. We’ve almost outgrown it, but not quite.
“Guys, help me get dressed,” she pleads. Hana’s the kind of beautiful that’s striking without being obtrusive; baby blue eyes framed by dirty blonde waves. I tell Hana she looks like “a yuppie who drank one too many margaritas on the girls trip to Miami,” which everyone takes in stride. I believe in naming personal style in ways that are little mean, as long as they’re accurate. Like this one dress I started referring to as “Dust Bowl Chic” after the time Grace and I thought it would hilarious to sneak in a bottle of wine to the Ken Burns documentary on the Dust Bowl and ended up incredibly drunk and so, so depressed.
“I don’t know,” she says, pulling at the shirt. “Can I look through what you have?” I gulp. My closet is color coded and then sub-organized by length. Hurricane Hana leaves everything in piles on the floor, or worse, haphazardly thrown back onto the wrong hanger after a few well-placed sighs and a “could you put everything back when you’re done?”
The first costume change brings us to the flare jeans she left in my room three days ago and a cut up t-shirt that I mostly wear for sleeping. I make some non-committal remarks and another gin and tonic. We’re gonna be here for a while.
I used to watch Pretty Little Liars, which is ABC Family’s answer to Gossip Girl but with less interesting, more convoluted plotlines and clothes that are decidedly not from Bergdorf’s. In one episode, one of the characters talks about how she knows her friends’ wardrobes by heart. After two years of this, I can’t imagine Hana’s going to find something she hasn’t already seen and rejected before, but I let her peruse because anyone who tries to stand in between Hana and her ability to pursue all her options gets bowled over.
Posh Spice Hana emerges clad in a tight black dress from American Apparel. Grace looks up from her phone in amusement; she owns it too. We make noises that indicate that we like but not love the look. It’s a little too formal for going to a concert and then drinking shitty beer in the senior backyards while pretending we’re less cold then we actually are until we can’t stand it anymore and go home. Hana tilts her head in the mirror. The neck is too high, she says.
Many, many costume changes later, Hana grabs my Achilles belt, the black one with the winged silver tips, from the hook in the closet and cinches it around her waist. She’s wearing the skirt from the original outfit and a top I haven’t worn since freshman year but I keep around for exactly these situations. Then she steps back from the mirror in a way that indicates that we’re not close to being done here.
Don’t get me wrong. We know better. We know it doesn’t matter what Hana wears or if my eyeshadow clashes with my jewelry or that most of Grace’s outfit came from the children’s section of a thrift store. We know that next weekend we’re gonna do the same thing and go to the same parties and talk to the same people until we graduate and go on into the real world and do something slightly different with slightly better alcohol until we settle down and have families and laugh about how when we were in college Hana spent an hour and a half getting dressed and I used terms like “Dust Bowl Chic.” Because even when I wanna wring Hana’s neck for leaving my shit all over the floor, I simultaneously want her to be there when I'm old and toothless and wear bedazzled shirts that make me look like a bat. In the immortal words of the Spice Girls: friendship never ends.