Monday, June 28, 2010

this post is totally not about a t-shirt

Out of sight, out of mind, or does absence make the heart grow fonder?

I have this t-shirt - it's kind of a school bus yellow with a cracked iron-on of a Rolls Royce - I got it about a billion years ago at a vintage shop in Seattle and it may be legitimately vintage - whatever the case, it's definitely old, it's got that wonderful soft, flimsy quality that a t-shirt takes on after many washings and wearings.

When I lived in Seattle, I used to wear it all the time and every time I wore it I always got compliments - maybe because it's a cool t-shirt, maybe because it's a bit tight in the chest area. Whatever the case, it was my favorite t-shirt.

Sometime in one of the billion moves, the t-shirt got packed into a box and misplaced.

For a while, I really felt the loss of that shirt. I dug through boxes and searched everywhere. I can't tell you the number of times I had the perfect place to wear it. The chase was kind of... interesting.

Eventually, I gave up the search. It wasn't that I didn't like the Rolls Royce t-shirt anymore, or that it was a less-cool shirt, it's just that after a while, the search for it started to seem... pointless, it was so one-sided, the shirt wasn't searching for me, it was just languishing in a box somewhere, it didn't give a crap if I found it or not. So I found another t-shirt I liked well enough and went along my way.

A couple months ago, I found the Rolls Royce t-shirt again - and I put it on (after washing and fabric softener-ing it) and something was different. It felt the same - thin and perfectly soft, and it looked the same, perfectly snug over the boob area with just enough give everywhere else, but it wasn't my favorite shirt anymore.

So I guess (for me), absence does make the heart grow fonder - at first, anyway - I missed the hell out of that shirt for a while. After enough time went by, though, that shirt became less and less... significant to me.  And even after the shirt and I found each other again, things were never exactly the same.

Labels: just sayin'