Skirt and Scarf

It was 2010 and it felt like the world was waiting for me, like it was waiting for me to delve in. It was bitterly cold at 8am on a Monday morning in September when I walked into my first period, calculus. My eyes were shifting in search of allies to cushion the feeling of being alone in this new quest. I knew I needed connections to be successful. After all, I was walking into my first class in college, and I was the first person in my family to do so. I was confident, curious, and ready to venture into uncharted territories with the new people around me but also hesitant of the environment.

Weeks passed without any solid connections, until the day I saw Nurin sitting across the room. I watched her with interest and knew immediately I had to be her friend. I knew the universe was in control after hanging out with her. It was like she was waiting for me as I was waiting for her. After that, it was like bread and butter, like milk and cookies, like peanut butter and jelly. We could be seen anywhere, everywhere together. Where you saw me and my skirt, you saw her in a scarf! We were Skirt and Scarf! It was like the world was waiting for us and we were storming through it together. We shared music, food, clothes, cultures, views, opinions and our experiences. It was a closeness beyond this world, a two-person niche.

Life was complex, hard at times. But, we had each other and that transcended every difficulty. Our connection was beyond friendship, and you could see it in the way we laughed. Each day, we laughed so hard that we thought we might burst. It was an out of body experience, sharing our days while battling the stress of college life and our unique backgrounds. In our many battles, it was laughter that led us to conquer. In confusion, it was understanding that led us to reasoning. It was like Ying and Yang, like day and night, like life and death. We tried, and sometimes we failed. In our trials, we found that the answer to what is undefined is always to be as one, the magic “in” Skirt and Scarf.

It was the purest friendship I’ve experienced in my life, and in a moment it showed me what love meant outside your own family. This was not an intimate relationship, this was “friend love.”

Each day we shared something new with each other, one particular day it happened to be a song. “Flightless bird, American mouth” was a song without any particular meaning, a song to be interpreted by the listener, the dancer, making it a song that could mean anything and everything. I listened intently and liked the song for its energy, its steady progressions, its lulling. A song to experience for Skirt and Scarf, as we swayed to the melody sung by a “quick wet boy” that “dived too deep” and then cut his “long baby hair” and “called” for his love, “a flightless bird,” everywhere. Yet, the words had no particular meaning for us.

Now, it is 2020, and we are grown, but never distant. And now, I understand the lyrics. I look back at those girls, Skirt and Scarf, and their transformations flash before my eyes. There are pieces of them that are still Skirt and Scarf, but more pieces have been added and some have been taken away. We've been moulded, bent, shaped and chipped away to give us a new form in American society. We dove into our worlds, we lost our innocence when we cut our long baby hair, we tried being fat house cats who sometimes weep at what’s lost, or nursing our sore, blunt tongues when we were thrown in the cold and cleaned, and we, we searched everywhere for our flightless bird. But, I look at my reflection and can see where it all started. And have we found it? Yes, because staring back at me is how it all started, Skirt and Scarf.