Belted

This week
marked a new era, a permanent change
in my being as a person on the earth

I bought a belt.

Two belts. One black and one brown. Just like a man.

Now my pants don’t fall down, they stay
where I put them so I don’t feel like a six-year-old just back from the bathroom, hitching up my pants while the teacher asks, “what took you so long?”

Why would your pants fall down, you ask, or maybe not, because really who cares?
The answer is, I don’t know, it has been a mystery to me why
I’d have to stop and pull up my pants, not because they were in danger of falling completely off, but because there was that tiny hint of a threat, a sagging that signaled the possibility of something worse, what could be worse, you ask, than an old lady with her pants falling down?

We don’t need to entertain that question, that one angel on the head of a pin
because now my pants are not ever going to fall down. I will go
to my grave with my jeans tightly cinched around my hollow waist and they’ll find both
the jeans and my belt when the archeologists come so many hundreds of years from now.

It is a great relief.

____________

Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (hhs.gov)