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Sitting in the middle of my half-empty apartment, I take the knife and cut the tape on the next box. I open it slowly, savoring the discovery process. Buried in a sea of handkerchiefs, I find my top hat.
I've had this hat for almost a decade. I remember the moment I got it—New Year's Eve, Y2K. I was wearing a silver dress and this hat. Friends and strangers danced together inside the pyramid-shaped club in Oceania under a fountain of champagne. I remember the blue lights and the incredible lightness of being one with the world. I felt, at that moment, like the future belonged to me. I didn't know where I was going or how I would end up there, but I knew the future was mine and nothing, nothing was going to stop me.
That's what this hat represents. That's why, after so many years, I still have it. It reminds me of the promise of knowing, without the shadow of a doubt, that the future is yours to shape at your desire.
I should be honest, though. There was a time period that I didn't have my hat.
After I got engaged, something came over me—it wasn't conscious, exactly. I don't know what it was. All I remember is the afternoon in Lima where I threw my closet doors open and began taking out all the things that described the life I'd led up to that point. My hat, the feather boas, the costumes, the naughty dresses, the sequin bikinis, the too-tall shoes—I had no use for them in the life into which I was walking.
I didn't throw these items out—I bequeathed them to my cousin Monica.
Almost two years into my marriage, my aunt wrote me and told me she'd been cleaning my grandmother's closet and found all her hats. She told me she wore one to a party, a gorgeous black hat made entirely of black feathers.
“I felt like the whole world was looking at me. I felt like I could do anything. It made me think of you.”
When I went to Peru, she gave me the hats. The act touched me deeply. It made me wonder why I had let go of my things when I got engaged.
Yes, it's true that my ex-husband never liked my hat. And it's true that to this day his reaction to seeing me in my hat for the first time still makes me think of that scene in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where Sabina tells Tomas of the other man in her life, “I've met another man. He's the best man I've ever met. He's bright, handsome and he's crazy about me. And, he's married. There's only one thing; he doesn't like my hat.” But I didn't discard these things because of my husband. I discarded them because I had redefined myself at the beginning of our engagement as someone who didn't have a need for those outlandish accessories and costumes.
What I didn't realize until later was that the flat-heels-cashmere sweater-and-pearls suburban wife was more of a costume than any of the other items I had discarded.
By some strange coincidence, while looking for a sweater at Monica's during that same trip to Peru, I found the items I had given her neatly arranged in her closet.
I asked for my hat back. She let me have it.
I take the hat out of the box now and look at it. It's been abused by the years and the uncertainty of living in a box for weeks.
Definitions. If we are our own masters, as I believe we are, it is within our power to change and become who we want to be. But what if we want to be something that's not true to us?
I put the hat on and turn to look at the mirror on my bathroom door.
Who is this woman in the hat?
My phone rings. It's a man I met recently. He wants to know whether I want to go out with him tonight to the premiere of a film about fire dancing. He dances with fire, too. Who plays with fire? I'm nervous about it. It's happening in Hollywood, a place in Los Angeles I seldom visit. A different crowd, a different world.
I'm hesitant and he can tell.
“You don't have to perform tonight,” he says to me. At first I think he's talking about the fire, then I realize he's talking about putting on a show for a group of people I don't know.
Do I perform? I do. And he can
