While I was doing laundry on October 19th, I realized I lost all my sweaters. One big box, the first box I packed before I moved to Brooklyn, was suddenly misplaced. Vanished. Disappeared not unlike the 43 Mexican student teachers.
Well, maybe not disappeared, I must have lost it long before October 19th. I must have misplaced it at 20th Street or maybe I took a cab and left it in the trunk. It was my biggest box, so I have a hard time believing that.
One way or another, I don't have my sweaters and it just got cold. Cold like I wake up freezing, stand in the bathroom after a shower soaking in the heat before I spring back to put socks on. And it just gets colder all year.
Luckily, I still have my flannel and jackets and sweatshirts, so I'm making due. I just bundle and layer and pretend the hodgepodge of fabric is as warm as a sweater or as snug as a sweater.
I don't feel great about losing these pieces which were part of me for so long (a couple of sweaters were my uncle's! A couple were from high school!) but in a different sense, being without them is freeing. I'm not tied to those threads, I am not defined by those colors. I can be a, like, a gray pashmina guy now. Or something. Are sweaters made of pashmina?
I feel like I'm rationalizing an accident, rather than finding the silver lining. I wonder if I were more careful, would they be lost in a cab, all of my best four plates and a pile of sweaters in soggy grocery store cardboard stuffed underneath a spare tire. Maybe I should have been more thoughtful. I wonder if they're being used or stuck with someone who doesn't handwash or sitting alone in a room, unused and unwanted. I wish I could tell them what they meant to me, now that they're gone.
But that's a waste too. Now I'm just repeating the mantras that I hear all the time. You move to Brooklyn, you lose your sweaters.
It really resonates now.
1 comment:
They were hurt, at first, but they have forgiven you and moved on, as you shall.
There will be more sweaters, have faith.
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