The closet is contested space.  It’s the bridge between her private home world and a step in leaving the house, of facing the wider world.  Most mornings start with a silent show down.  She’ll slide open the mirrored door and stand with her hair still damp from the shower dripping onto her shoulders and a towel wrapped around her.  She grumbles about the options, more so if she hadn’t done laundry that week.  She shifts through the hangers willing for something to jump out at her. 

Grad school had not only caused her body to shift and change in ways that rendered it unfamiliar to her causing her clothes to hang in ways that made her cringe and not recognize herself, but the constant reading and typing, hours spent in chairs huddled over keyboards and books just intensified the split between her body and her conception of herself.  Yet every morning she is reminded that her body exists and will have to bump around in public with other bodies, and so the closet.  On good mornings she begrudgingly pulls on jeans and a T-shirt and tries to push aside the unease that has become an everyday occurrence and then stomps into the kitchen to turn on the kettle for coffee.  On harder mornings she makes piles of rejected articles that will have to be put away when she gets home on the bed before finally settling on a choice only when she realizes how late she is now running.