AThingThatMakesMeGoHmmmmmm: The Charity Shop Shirt

Last Night The Smell in Your Shirt Was Gone

I kept a shirt, and it was yours.

I used to be able to smell you in your old shirt: that shirt you'd gotten from the charity shop.

I remember thinking how that smell was you.

Even after a million washes, there was still you.

Then we stopped. It stopped. The mind is fascinating:

No sooner have you told yourself you'll never forget,

Then you live and then in the living and the moving on,

You forget.

You forget with every ounce of the effort you intended to remember with.

You can't remember, because your mind chooses what the spirit cannot.

The shock to the system was profound after the move from the old house here.

In the old house, I swear to god that smell of you was always in that shirt.

But no, no it must not have been.

When I looked up, after unboxing and storing. I noticed.

The smell in your shirt was gone.

And I stood up and thought. Now

Where did it go?

Where was I when it left?

How is it I cannot keep that moment, that sense memory?

And why? Why is it we cannot have what we hope for

In spite of the brutality of partition.

The nation of our lives was cleaved. And the smell of you was gone.

And the smell of that shirt in the charity shop

Left, during the move.

I suppose I should be grateful.

But I'm left with the feeling that if I'd only paid attention.
If I'd only opened that box first

If I'd only remembered which box it was in.

If I hadn't run into it in a peculiar moment,

I'd have known what it was from that shirt from the early 20th century

That bonded us.

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AThingThatMakesMeGoHmmmmmm