At costume shop: Female, Black hair.

I imagine you beneath the ground, buried in layers of cloth, scraps you have found all over campus: the patterned remnants of curtains from Anything But Clothes; a sleeve torn from a Halloween costume; an old prom dress from your distant high school years. The sewing machine clatter echoing outwards into the halls, its voice filling in the gaps where actors have forgotten their lines or dancers have missed a step. You are trying to make a costume that fits you, just you. One that does not disguise, but instead reveals. You want someone to see you, not the characters you play. Later, you follow the zigzag stitching of thread out of your labyrinth, the campus a dark ghost town now, the few lights left stretching out your shadow. The next morning, you are cheerful, but your smile is a well-crafted mask. I have seen the way clothes hang heavy on you on stage in Harbach, I have connected the needle-pricks that have altered your fingerprints. I know the stitching will come loose and you will be forced to weave your way back down those stairs. You will soon give up on cloth, convinced you can make nothing from it, and move on to different materials: the multicolored leaves that cover the sidewalks; cardboard boxes left out to recycle; poems you stole from a friend’s workshop. You make a corset from squirrel bones. A pair of socks from cello strings. A skirt from the feathers of crows. You are certain if you could just bottle the noises the trains make, the noises you tell your friends you don’t even notice anymore but in truth keep you up on lonely nights, if you could just bottle those, pluck them note by note from the glass, hold them safe in your palm, you could knit them into something warm for winter. If you could peel your own shadow from the pavement, wrap yourself in it, maybe that would be enough. The business office refuses to acknowledge the hours you log, convinced you could not be spending twelve hours each day, a needle pressed between your forefinger and thumb, awake and making. They do not know the way you are trapped. Enough. Undress me. Dress me up. Take me out. Take me home.