What if you dressed the part . . .

Steph tried on the closet of her future self. It lead her onto the page and into her life in new ways.

Speaking of future selves . . .

Almost exactly a year ago, an image of a woman snaked through my body and into my consciousness. It didn’t take long for me to recognize her as a version of me three, four, maybe five years ahead of where I am now.

Her hair was longer and streaked with grey. She was wearing a cream-colored silk skirt with a white linen tank. She was standing in a kitchen— the kitchen of my future, humming and chopping fresh herbs. Her body struck me as very alive and very relaxed.

My future self turned around when she heard me arrive. We locked eyes and she let out a small gasp. Without saying anything, she walked slowly toward me, slipped one arm behind the small of my back, pulled me into her, and kissed me. Like really kissed me. She ate me like I was an oyster— salty and sweety

The scent of gardenia filled the air. A wave of electricity moved through my body from tip to tail, swirling in my lower belly. Pleasure rippled across every inch of me.

My god, I thought. She loves me. We love each other. We’ve fallen in love with ourselves.

“What’s possible from this place?” I asked her.

“Everything,” she said. “Let me show you.”

***

After receiving this vision, I went to the boutique around the corner from my house and bought myself a dress as close to the one in the vision as I could find. I owned nothing of the sort. I lived in torn jeans, gray and black button-down boyfriend shirts, and a pair of beat-up Blundstones. The dress was white. It had spaghetti straps, a smocked bodice, a lace-up, corseted back, and a full, mid-length skirt.

I could barely look myself in the mirrored eye when I tried it on, which was one of the reasons I knew it was perfect. The other reason, was another customer in the change room who turned to me and said, “My gosh! That dress was made for you.”

About a month later, when I left for my six-week jaunt to Europe, the dress of my future self was the first thing I packed. I wore it often and every time I did, I felt another part of me unfurling. One might even say that the metaphorical buttons of my self and my imagination were bursting wide open.

When I got home, I hung the dress in my closet, sat at my computer, and wrote a few lines. I didn’t know it at the time, but they were the first of the romance novel I am now writing. Something tells me my well-dressed future-self has been in on this book from the very beginning.

Ooooh . . . one more thing: There is a photo of me wearing my future self’s dress on the altar I made for this creative endeavor. I wrote about said altar HERE so if you’re curious about the dress, all you have to do is head back in time.

Read on.

Excerpt from Chapter 1

There is a white, cotton dress hanging in my closet. If you look closely, you’ll see a small stain on the left breast of the dress—a tiny brown spot from where the figs bled through.

I’ve scrubbed the stain, I’ve dipped it in white wine, I’ve rubbed baking soda into it, I’ve worked dish soap into its threads, rinsing it with warm, cold, and hot water. The stain will not budge, nor will the images that still move through my body from that spring and summer— a months-long spell of white wine and fresh figs.

As I begin this story, it feels important that we’re on the same page about figs. So, let’s start with that, shall we?

Do you know that a fig is not a fruit but an inflorescence? It is a cluster of flowers – tens if not hundreds - enclosed within and blooming inside the stem of a plant. The rounded belly of a fig is a synconium, a fleshy hollow in which the inverted flowers come into blossom.

I’ve always thought of figs as the most erotic of fruits; now I know they are. And so do you. What I’d like to tell you next is about the tens if not hundreds of ways I became a fig, blooming from the inside out, staining my dress as I went. What I’d like to tell you next is how the world around you changes when you know your insides are field, after field, after field of flower.

We met in May at a park whose name I mispronounced. He corrected me.

“Mar-yahn,” he said.

“Ahh, okay. Thank you.”

“It’s also my first name,” he added.

“But I thought . . .”

“I know . . . I don’t put my first name correct in the app.”

That should have been my first flag – not the fact that we’d met on an app but the fact that he’d not used his real name - but when you’re turning into a fig, it’s common to miss a few things. Or so my future self would find out.

“As you can see,” he said, “my name is a little hard to pronounce. It’s better to say Maki. So you can call me Maki.”

I called him Maki. And when I talked to Emma later that night we named him Maki Daddy.

P.S. Wanna slip into the slipstream of your future self? Steph has three spots open this April for one-on-one Deliverance Sessions (A.K.A. a snapshot of the myth you are unfolding into). Click THIS LINK for more info and booking.