For years I’d tried to compress my desires, to burn them away, like waste. I had this theory, I said, that that was why I would never be graceful. My body jarred from the fight of trying to keep it all inside me, it made me clumsy. Desires would rise up and I’d knock an elbow into something, or my hand would give out on the glass I was holding and I would watch it as it slipped through my fingers, shattered. I hoped so badly, I told him, to one day be the kind of woman who could wear white.
