I tried on my old clothes and found they smelt like a woman who was not me. I wondered if the man who loved me suddenly began to love another, if he dressed her in my clothes and sprayed her wrists with my perfume. I wondered if in the dark of our marital bed he pretended her parts were mine — for her figure felt the same against his blind handsiness, for when he kissed her hands he smelt the same pheromones. I wondered for how long had he replaced me with a ghost of myself without my noticing.
After a time I felt a shift inside me not visible in the mirror, but like wearing the wrong skin feels like an unfitting glove on your hand. And in my head I found myself irritated with a new voice — how it was like mine, but with all its greatness echoed so far down a hallway that it soured, soured into a mocking caricature of women I do not like.
But I could not tell him of the new inhabitant of his wife’s head, for it would not be his infidelity but my mania unfolding to him. Then I would be dressed by the nurse like a geriatric. And as I would be buttoned into a hospital gown, my condition would clip into my skin. For I would see the nurse fold and place my old clothes, bearing the faint stench of a woman who was not me. For this would shroud me in my new residence where I would lie, waiting.
And so it is, I sit here with two realisations forever. First: that truly another woman had taken my old clothes, my figure, tried on my heart. That it was not just a new scent on my yellow dress but a new person in my mind.
Through trial and error my fingers fumbled for days along the slits of my skin until I finally conceded the second: that I could not point out to the nurse where I started and this stranger ended.
