Everywhere around me I see the rent and gaping garments of the grieving. I’ve long wondered about this trend, which is not new and has been especially noticeable in women’s athleisure wear (“sporty doilies” is how one columnist brilliantly described it in 2018). I saw it on my walk around the neighborhood this morning–women in backless tanks revealing spidery sports bra straps, their exposed flesh like tender tile in grout. I see it in the bare midriffs and perforated Crocs of my students. I even saw it last night, in the cleanly torn collar lines of the US Open men’s semifinal match. It seems we are all a little exposed, a little vulnerable these days. I think of what the past few years have taken from us, like vultures picking at Prometheus’s liver, and what they have given. There’s a sense of venturing some skin in the game again, perhaps, after two long years of seeing healthcare workers don PPE that made them look–and probably feel–like astronauts. Or aliens. How maybe now we wear our collective bereavement like a bride’s translucent veil, flirting with both worlds (this one and the hereafter) because they’ve come so close to each of us, are so loosely partitioned. How we are still kissing cousins of the ancients…
Well, then 