My friends' clothes...

revawilliams:

I like wearing my friends’ clothes. I have done it since I was little, through borrowing or the ever-wonderful hand-me-down/clothing exchange/”here you take this, I don’t wear it anymore”. It doesn’t matter how it happens. I like owning and wearing and seeing within my own possessions, my friends’ former things.

I have jewelry that a good friend’s first love gave her in high school. It isn’t right for me (i.e. I look silly in it), but I keep it in a box next to my bed, and when I am looking for a safety pin or an earring, I come across it, and I remember her heartache and flame, the stories and the suffering, the old life—the one she might have chosen that would have ensured that I never would have met her and loved her and been loved by her. The jewelry is a cairn that was erected by a lover I don’t know in her life before I knew her. My keeping it accomplishes nothing except that it recalls to my mind that she loved and was loved years before I ever met her.

Right now, I am wearing an old pair of jeans of Katie’s. They’re a bit too tight in the butt, although I don’t really care. In some ways, their over-snugness makes them even nicer to wear because I have to remember the jeans while they’re on my body, which means I also remember Katie, who is beautiful and subtle, shimmering and deceivingly placid. Her body is made up of pale, long lines, and when not-pale, not-long-lined me wears her old jeans, I feel present with her in a strange and intimate way—to the lines and angles of her limbs and hips, her narrow feet and the slight freckling across her forearms, and to all the other things about her, too. The things that have nothing to do with clothing: her voice and her work, her laugh when she is in the other room on the phone, the way she looks when she awakens from a nap.

I have an AC/DC sweatshirt that my husband bought a couple years ago at a vintage clothing store. It’s a hoodie from the Back In Black years, and I feel like a teenage boy when I wear it. Who knew feeling like a teenage boy could be so relieving to a woman in her early thirties? Chad did. The day he bought it he had tried to convince me that I would love it, but I’d shunned the thing and the idea that he might know what clothes I turn to for comfort. He wore it for a month before it took up residence on my side of the closet or on my person: safe and warm and Midwestern and ever-so-slightly rebellious (for a preacher’s kid who wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music, AC/DC ranked high on the list of do-nots). When my friend Will Gray sees me in it, he asks what is wrong, and rightly so: it is the thing I wear then the world feels like it is too much for me, it is my turtle’s shell to pull into. It is the thing my husband saw and knew I could/would take refuge in.

When my friends, Marke and Kim and their daughter Maxx, moved away from Cambridge to Denver this past summer, they left me with a box of clothes that they couldn’t fit in with all their other move-ables: pants and t-shirts, mostly. I kept a lot of it, but my overwhelming favorite is a yellow, 3/4-sleeve Missouri Tigers jersey with a half-moon tear right across my chest so that I have to wear something underneath it. By the way it fits me, I’m assuming it was Kim’s, although I never saw her in it. But when I wear it, with its heavy, soft fabric against my skin, it is easy to imagine her: younger, in college, taking elementary education classes even though she would never become an elementary school teacher, worrying about papers and grades and faux lesson plans—her life before I was in it. Her life apart from me.

My friend, Kate, had a blue sweater that she wore constantly in college. I don’t remember how it made its way to me, but I have been scurrying about in it now for at least five years. It zips up to a place just under my nose, and it requires the sleeves to be cuffed, and even though it’s been washed scores of times since I acquired it from her, every time I put it on, I swear I can still smell the linseed oil she used in her paintings her senior year in the old art annex with the sloping, condemned, fun-house floor and the requisite open window (even in the dead of winter) to keep herself safe from the oil’s fumes.

And I think this is why I love my friends’ former things: I love to be reminded of their lives apart from me. That before I was a consideration, they were. That now, whether or not we are far from one another, they are. Friendship in the contemporary age (for me, at least) functions like it seems some love affairs used to. I don’t mean that they are sexual, I just mean that they feel necessary to me: essential and blessed, in the stars or set in motion by some benevolent god. If all my clothes and jewelry and hair-dos and shoes were things that my friends used to wear, the world would be as I have always envisioned it in its finest hour: full of fraternity and shot-through with proof of interconnectedness, radiating with shared life and lives and the strange happenstance of love. I like being non-essential. And I like very much that all this evidence of life going on apart from me only underscores (for me, at least) that love is a very delicious and undeserved and fully-operational in-and-of-itself thing.