Dear Boy I Briefly Had A Crush On In High School:

Tonight around 6:15 pm, EDT, your old flannel shirt from 1993 passed out of the world of attire and into the scrap pile, when it will soon be dismembered and used for things like dusting and maybe polishing the silver.  The shirt was (I’m guessing here) somewhere between 26-30 years old. Maybe older. I have no idea whether it came new to you, or as another hand-me-down. You might remember, if you remember you had this shirt at all. It was 1993, after all. The world was awash in plaid flannel shirts. Even I had several, and I was the kind of girl that at the very apex of grunge was all I’m looking for a prom dress that says “Versailles, 1780.”

I ended up with your plaid shirt because we were in a play together. Shakespeare. I loaned my old summer camp foot locker as prop and after the run, when we struck down the stage, I took it home and put it back into my mother’s basement and didn’t think about it until sometime (maybe a year) later, when I was looking for a place to hide an ashtray and a pack of cigarettes (which I wasn’t supposed to be smoking) in the basement (where I wasn’t supposed to be smoking) and landed on the trunk. When I opened it, I found several things: a school t-shirt commemorating Girls’ Sports Day 1992 (with the classic It’s weird what slides by the censors at prep school slogan: Stick ‘Em, Spike ‘Em, That’s the Way We Like ‘Em!), a campus book store copy of Tess of the D’Ubrervilles with testicles and an erect penis drawn on the title page, a plastic sword used by one of our classmates, and your shirt.

I thought about giving your shirt back. I didn’t have any sentimental attachment to it. My crush on you had ended almost as soon as it began. You were kind of weird, and not in some sexy, dangerous way, but in that “let’s get naked and talk about our feelings and I’ll tell you about these vegan self-help books I’ve been reading” sort of way. To be clear, I was also weird, and also not in a sexy, dangerous way, but more in a “OMG I can’t wait to go to college where I hope to date a sexy communist and start an loud, all-girl garage band that sings entirely about how all men in Modernist novels are terrible” kind of way. We weren’t the right fit. And that was fine. But I kept your shirt, even though it was a bleh gray-brown plaid and kind of ugly, because you didn’t go to my school anymore and it was trouble to get it back to you.  It was soft and I figured it would be good for pajamas.

That was twenty-four years ago. I don’t know why it lasted as long as it did. I don’t have much else from high school, save the a couple prom dresses (including the Versailles one), yearbooks, a few pictures, a box of letters and a bunch of really hilarious journals, in which you figure prominently for a couple of months junior year but then resolve into ham-fisted, 11th grade erotica about a gorgeous, furious leather-jackety type that was very clearly not you and a bewilderingly precise recounting of the meaningless l bullshit C and I  talked about when we drove the abandoned warehouse circuit (years before it gentrified) in her dad’s SUV, smoking Virginia Slim Lights we stole from my Mom and listening to that one Cocteau Twins song on over and over again.

I last wore the shirt in January, while I had the flu. I ordered cake and pineapple from Whole Foods and slipped money under the door, so I wouldn’t be a public health disaster. I watched Harry Potter movies,[1] even though I am too old, I was too old, when they came out. At some point I reached up to scratch the back of my neck and my finger snagged the collar, at which point the collar just sort of disintegrated. I had a thought that I might try to fix it, but seriously, that’s probably not going to happen and, like, the shirt is almost thirty years old and falling apart.

R.I.P. Shirt

You were a good shirt. Even if you were bleh gray-brown. 

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[1] As boarding school movies go, they’re not too bad. If you take away the actual magic, they’re certainly no less credible than, say, “Dead Poets Society,” a movie that paints schools like ours as a kind of soul-crushing rich kid suicide machine, and yet 100% convinced us that we should be attending boarding school.

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