That red-laced dress

Dearest,

Oh that red lace dress…

Do you remember the one I picked out at the 2^nd-hand store on Queen Street and called you to come and take a look? And so willingly, though with a roll in your eyes, as if to say “it’s just a dress…pick one”, you came anyways and suffered being the only man in a room full of 20’s-era dresses and pure silk stockings.

“Baby, you look damn sexy, I love it on you”, you whispered in my ear.

I needed that from you – that way you would make me feel so desired over the simplest things.

“I love your little tooth and how it sticks out over your lip…” you’d have a knack of finding the little parts of me that never seemed to be noticed by anybody else.

No matter what I would wear, no matter if I gained weight or lost it, you found something beautiful in me. You let me be me in my doc marten boots, made-it-myself t-shirts, silver nose-ring hoop and baggy sweatshirts and still you would hold me and make love to me.

That’s why it hurt so much when that night, at the gala when you drank too much of the free red wine, you agreed with the only other black man with the dreads that “red only looks good on black people...” I was the only person who was wearing a fully red dress that night.

When you mumbled to me on the way home in the taxi about what he had said to you, my pride turned into my stomach, pulling all of my beauty with it. Is this really what you thought? Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you stick up for me? Why did you let me go out and look like a clown in public? Is this what black people thought of white people? The core pain of racial divisions around beauty stabbed through our relationship for the first time.

It is a terrible thing when you realize your beloved sees you as something less than wonderful.

Though I haven’t reflected much about it, it is possible this was one of the things that lead to our demise. Me not being beautiful in your eyes anymore, feeling you would much rather be with a woman who looks good in a red dress.