Second Hand
Nov 16, 2013
RNH
She’s been wearing me for five years now. I’ve watched so
many people come and go; she can’t seem to make up her mind. How she has
changed! And yet stayed so very much the same.
I think I am her favorite, though I am plain and not particularly
stylish and in some cases, like in the rain, not very functional. I absorb
everything, including all those drinks and sauces she spills. More ranch dressing, really? But I fit
length-wise and that’s all that really matters to her.
I have seen the most beautiful places. France, Italy, Spain,
Amsterdam, New York, Seattle, San Francisco – the Golden Gate Bridge really is
as spectacular as the photos. The many times when she’s needed me, I’ve been
happy to wrap around her torso and arms, happy to live my destiny as she lives
hers.
One time she took me to the top of Piazzale Michelangelo
where she sat on the steps with her friends and drank cheap champagne over the
rooftops of Florence. The sunset made the sky all pink and orange. She made me
really love sunsets. She would always talk about how beautiful it was, the time
of day when time slows, when the sky changes its mind and you can love without judgment.
And the Eiffel Tower! How magnificent. At night it sparkles
and glitters. We would go there all the time. Once, alone, in the middle of the
night, she walked under the big beams on the way home and I think she was
crying but when I looked up at her she was laughing.
There were a lot of nights in Paris. When her old lover came
to visit for Thanksgiving, she took him to the tower to sit and drink wine. I
kept her warm. She ate a whole block of cheese nervously, probably to keep
herself from thinking too hard, because if she did she would realize that she
did not love him and never would.
I sometimes heard her talk about warm places she’s been:
Africa, Japan, Hawaii, India. Imagine, seeing the Taj Mahal! Or spreading out
on the sand in Kauai. How lucky those tee-shirts are.
I’m important, I remind myself. What would she have done
that winter night she was stranded in Barcelona? But still, she could take
better care of me. Like the button on my sleeve that fell off two years ago on
an airplane. Instead of replacing it she just folds the flap over the hole.
And does she think these stains don’t accumulate? I’ve been
washed three times, maybe. How I’d love to be new again, and the dyer, so
terrifyingly spectacular. I’m important, I remind myself; I am hers and she is
mine.
Then things took a turn. She’d stash me in the corner of
bars while she danced, keep me in her boyfriend’s car “just in case,” leave me
on the couch crinkled and forgotten. I was sad because I didn’t get to see the
things that she saw, but mostly because I think she loved me less.
One August afternoon she stuffed me in a bag and when I
awoke we were at the Goodwill on Clayton Road. Somebody pierced me with a price
tag and I never saw her again.
Months later a teenage girl convinced her mom to buy me – because
she’d grow into me and that, after all, she needed a black coat and she
promised to fix my button and I was only five dollars. So they took me to their
house and the girl hung me on a pink plastic hanger. Where would you like to go first? I asked as she put me in the
closet.
I’ve lost track of time now, wondering what’s happening out
there and whispering to the others in the dark about the Louvre and Times
Square and thinking about those tee-shirts on the beaches in paradise.
