3 days ago
Legs And The City: Why This Summer Is Going To Be The Season of My Legs
My legs: muscular during my years of playing varsity soccer and basketball and running track; long and sinewy in my later adult life; milky-pale every winter, yet sunburned often and easily in the summer. They've carried me up endless flights of stairs, and walked me down the runway at a fashion show. Lately they've been swollen, bruised, dotted with needle holes and—when I dissociate from them as my own—almost grotesquely beautiful for the thick brown striations zig-zagging down my calves like a variety of Italian marble.
Those lines are traces of veins that no longer function. A vascular specialist informed me back in November that they weren't working sufficiently, which is more detrimental to my health than not working at all, surprisingly. And so we're in the process of destroying them, one by one. Systems re-route, and other veins will pick up the slack. The body is an incredible thing!
With my legs in their current condition, I can't stop ogling at the gams on others: Tyla shimmering like a disco ball in a sequined dress slit up to her waist; ballet dancer Misty Copeland's graceful choreography in the short film 'Flower,' the flocks of women donning Cecilie Bahsen's ruffly, bubble-hemmed minidresses outside the designer's most recent fashion show in Paris; a Calvin Klein ad featuring Lily Collins, outfitted in just a blazer and sheer black hosiery, sitting with her legs coquettishly twisted and then splayed out on the ground. Collins's gaze is strong, but it's her legs that make this power pose. There are also my favorite fitness instructor's legs: sturdy, muscular, reliable limbs that obey on command; legs that don't let her down. Everyone has better legs than me these days, simply for their ability to flaunt them.
I've been reluctant to write about my ongoing lower body hangup because I didn't want to cast it as a revelation about my condition. I haven't shared my months-long treatments on social media, mostly because those sorts of public disclosures aren't really my style. But also, I know that my situation could be much worse. For once in my life, I'm actually unbothered by New York's cold winter months when going bare-legged isn't even a question. And it turns out the compression stockings I've had to wear under my clothes for weeks at a time are as warm as my Heattech layers. I've even had fun finding new ways to make sweatpants look chic, or styling my Adidas track pants with Kallmeyer blazers and other 'business-up-top' options. And on the occasions that I do wear a skirt or dress—midi to longer lengths—my tall, faux croc Dôen boots have become my reliable slip-ons.
