The pants fit.

A hundred or so years ago, I bought a pair of pants that didn’t fit. They were the coolest things: red and black plaid, pipe legs, pleated pockets. When I saw them—in their utter isolation (read: this one pair had the shelf to itself and there weren’t any more sizes to be had)—I wanted them so badly my teeth ached. But they were size 7/8. Me? Let’s just call it “size 18 with elastic waist.”

Needless to say, I bought the pants. I slapped my credit card down and busied myself with the sparkly headbands at the counter so I wouldn’t have to confront what I imagined was a doubtful gleam in the sales clerk’s eye.

And I took those pants home, in all their checkered glory, and put them away: on the top back shelf of my closet where only sentimental university sweatshirts and dust live.

Last night, I pushed my office chair over to my closet door and reached up high. My fingers found the fabric and pulled. My wildest fantasy tumbled into my arms.

For a bit, I left the dream on the edge of the bed. I busied myself around its perimeter, feigning casualness, sidestepping its attention-seeking presence, pretending I wasn’t staring down a huge challenge in size small.

At last, of course, my resistance fell away. I picked up the pants and held them against me. Surely the waist would be more forgiving than this. Surely the plaid is playing tricks with my eyes and the legs will offer more spacious accommodation than they appear to, lying flat. Surely this dream is poised to be realized, and not smashed like pumpkin filling on the floor beside my bed.

I pushed my right foot into the pant leg gingerly, pointing my toe to make my entire limb as streamline as possible. I pulled them up. Next leg.

The button at the waist was, understandably, the biggest hurdle in my path. Sucking in my breath to the point of genuine concern for my body’s ability to continue to sustain life, I drew the two sides of this argument together and, right in front of my belly button, achieved a resolution.

The pants fit.

Well, “fit,” in a liberal-minded kind of interpretation of the concept. No need, after all, to be too hasty in our employment of this complicated term. Let’s just say I got the garment hiked up over my body and got its attendant clasps fastened—and all without having to alert the media or call in the authorities.

They aren’t the most comfortable articles of clothing I have in my oeuvre, these pants. The waist is higher than I prefer, the plaid isn’t proving to be all it might have been, and the pleated pockets make me look like an extra from Dynasty.

But for all they’re not, there’s so much more that these two-legged, outdated tartan wonders are: a dream that, under canopy of a closet roof that so long contained their promise, was achieved in my bedroom last night.