When I was six, I found a dress that would soon become my favorite. I found it in the women’s aisle, a dress that seemed to swallow me up. The dress was scarlet red, covered with sequins down the front, but not the kind that scratch the crap out of your arms. It was a straight style, with no sleeves and a button at the nape of the neck. When I first bought this dress, it folded on the floor beneath my toes, but I begged my great aunt to buy it for me. Of course she did, as she was persuaded by the puppy eyes that gleamed up at her in joy.

That dress saw everything: it was danced in, played in, and was worn about 6 days a week. I would have worn it for seven, but my mother insisted it be washed at least once in a while. I cried in that dress, laughed in it, and pouted in it. I learned to read while wearing it, I learned to multiply, I pedaled my first lap on my bike. I watched friends come and go, people moving in and out of my life like a revolving door, yet I always found myself pulling that dress over my head each morning.

Until one day, I pulled the dress over my head and it got stuck. What had once spiraled down to my feet now barely reached my waist. The arm holes hugged my shoulders just a little too tightly, and the neck hole was just short of a choker. The dress that I had worn for most of my life, the dress that shimmered in the presence of a child’s tears, a band-aid to skimmed knees and sprained ankles, would now be just a glint in the bottom of a dresser drawer. 

I picked up the dress and the thin fabric seemed to crumble between my fingertips. The dress was no longer bright red, but more of a pastel, the soft fabric worn from years of wear. I folded up the dress, assuring there were no wrinkles in the fabric, and placed it in a box beneath my bed. While I usually donated old clothes that didn’t fit, I treasured the memory of what the red dress was: an ode to my childhood.

Years later, whenever I need a good laugh or a time of comfort, I pull out that red dress. For years I thought that red dress was the reason for my strength, for my laughter. But that was far from the case. All the times of falling off my bike, bruised elbows and broken bones, the red dress did not get me through. It simply gave me the courage to find the strength within myself.