Hats.

I am a hat girl.

It's not always been this way- I remember being in grade/middle school and hating hats. They messed with my bangs. I only wore earmuffs. The word earmuffs bothers me now. Say it aloud. Earmuffs. It sounds weird. And the visual? Like some awful headband, or DJ-type who had a fur fetish. Yeah, um, no.

Anyway.

Somewhere in high school I began a love affair with hats. I say love affair loosely. I never actually did anything remotely sexual with a hat, merely put them on my head. But I loved the feel of a hat covering my head. I used to steal my boyfriend's baseball cap, all broken in and huge and smelling of him. It covered half my face. I'm sighing at the thought of it now, it was so great. My youth director bought me my own cap for my seventeenth birthday. A Yankees hat, God forgive him, but it was flannel, and he had the decency to rubber-band the bill before wrapping it. I wore it whenever I could.

Somewhere in my history, I got over the baseball cap and moved on to hats that are more fitting for a girl. Like ski caps, or newsboys, or bucket caps. Sunhats. All huge and covering much of my head, half of my eyes. To appear as some kind of enigma. Or because my head is small and I can wear a child's size. Whichever.

But I went through a period of time when I stopped wearing hats. Somehow, whenever I put one on it looked off. I couldn't figure it out, if my face had changed, or if my haircut was wrong, but the hats didn't work. And it was weird to look at myself in a mirror and think, "You used to be this hat person and now you're not. What's different?"

And the answer is a lot of things. Sometimes you look in the mirror and you don't recognize yourself. You see who you used to be, who you want to be, but can't for the life of you figure out who you are in that moment. I've had a lot of those moments. I will, I'm sure, continue to have them in the future. But for now, I'm a hat girl again. Bought one the other day. It's fancy. Gray felt. Soft. Big, of course, even though it's a small. I wear it cocked to the side, covering my right eye for that proper sense of mystery. Despite the fact that I'm the most obvious girl in the world. Even so, I love it. I feel like a badass in a hat. Like a woman with purpose, with intention. Because you don't wear a hat tentatively, you wear it with confidence.

Listening to: Death Cab For Cutie "Codes and Keys"

xo. kb.