Yesterday I stood before my dresser, pawing through my underwear drawer for something to wriggle into after a shower, and had the thought, “Should I wear these pink ones? No, they’re too nice. I should save them.”
Immediately, I had the next logical thought: “Save them for what?”
In my early twenties, the daily decision between “good underwear” and “garbage underwear” carried more weight than panties would seem to. If I was headed to a university lecture, a coffee date with a friend, a family brunch, or some other event where sex was absolutely 1,000% not going to happen, I would pick something faded and stretched out from the Hanes 2006 catalogue. (If you know, you know.)
But there would be days – maybe once a month, maybe a few times a week, depending on what was going on in my admittedly absurd sex life at the time – when I would make the conscious decision to slip into something lacy, or silky, or satiny, and most assuredly stain-free. I would do this, optimistically, if there was even a 20% chance I might be having sex in the coming hours. It felt like casting a spell, setting an intention, and the intention was confidence and self-assuredness in a moment that had yet to come.