Emergency Inventory

Woke up at 3am in a cold sweat because I’d suddenly realized, mid-dream, that it had been months since I’d seen Miley Cyrus topless. This is a real thing that happened to me. I won’t defend it. I opened the folder on my phone—yes, there’s a folder, yes it’s organized, I’m not going into further detail—and spent half an hour swiping through the archive until my heart rate dropped enough to sleep. These are the costs of being who I am.

The timing was good, because apparently Miley was paying attention, and within the week she posted a new one on Instagram. Technically she has her hands over her chest, so we’re not quite back to full operational capacity, but there’s enough there to confirm she hasn’t entirely given up the enterprise. She’s still in contact with the person she used to be. That’s what I needed to know.

There’s a version of Miley—the wrecking ball era, the VMAs foam finger era, the "I’m not wearing a shirt and I’m going to make this everyone’s problem" era—that I find genuinely compelling. Not just for the obvious reasons, though obviously for those reasons too. But she was doing something real with that persona: something about bodily autonomy and the absurdity of celebrity purity culture, and she was doing it while being extremely funny and apparently also perpetually stoned. I miss her.

The current Miley is older and more tasteful and occasionally wears shirts on purpose. People grow. But this Instagram post feels like a message, or at least a test. One hand back in the old bag. A small flag on formerly occupied territory.

I’ve added the photo to the folder. The archive remains open to new acquisitions. I’m still waiting for the day she burns the whole grown-up act down—no hands, no tasteful framing, just Miley nude announcing something at full volume—so we can all strip off in the streets and scream Wrecking Ball the way God intended. But this will do for now.