Existential Clothes Horse

I had pause to think about what makes me, this week.  I was wondering up the road, about to be picked up and driven to the theatre, and my mind for reasons of its own choosing decided to run the once over on the clothes I was wearing.

To whit, I was wearing a jumper bought in Next some time around 2002 or 2003; a T-shirt from Farmers (NZ shop) from about 2013; jeans from Peacocks, 2018; socks and pants from M&S 2010 and 2017 respectively and trainers from some sports shop 2017, too.  The various British bought guff having travelled to and from the other side of the earth and now too, the t-shirt.  I was a composite of countries and stores and times and different mes.

The me who bought the jumper is alien now.  I cannot bring myself to look at that man in photos.  He is entirely not me both in the sense that every cell that existed in him has changed and that the views and the attitudes he held aren’t mine anymore.  At the very least, I have the good graces to be embarrassed at the manner of the man I once was.  It isn’t pleasing to be reminded of him and what tells you everything about him is that the jumper bought then he never wore.  It never fitted him.  Now it hangs loose on me.  The weight I carried as that man gone.  Going.

The M&S socks are a revelation.  They have stayed with me for an age and are only now holing.  They held firm whilst all equivalent NZ varieties, whether cheap make-dos or proper socks from proper shops snagged and tore, some on their very first outing on foot.  Oddly, a later vintage of M&S sock are already fraying and breaking.  Vimes’ shoe theory expanded.

The T-shirt is a cheap one from a Kiwi department store.  It has been worn many, many times.  A comfort blanket.  Grey.  Apt.  It now shows signs of discolouration and overwear about the seams and down the back.  It has done its dash and carried me through these long days.  Perhaps it needs retiring.

The pants and the trainers were bought as a stocking-up process a Christmas visit to Blighty a year and a bit back, now.  They were to see me through until the next visit back – whenever that was going to be.  They wre not to be worn over here, that’s for certain.

And then it all changed.

And then I needed to spend cheaply on a pair of jeans.  Peacocks.  The belt has disintegrated around the waist already.  The heels had frayed out where they’ve been trampled on.  They are already loose about me.  The first purchase back in the country.  The first part of the new me and they already do not fit properly.

Being me back over here has not been a simple shift.  Still, nearly a year on, my brain refuses to dream of anything other than New Zealand and the life I had there.  It sends me crashing back to the time and the place or to the people night after night and I wake each morning sore headed and irked by the vivid pictures remaining behind my eyes in the initial stage of day starting.

The play I was on my way to seeing was Dracula.  Apt, really.  My Mina is everywhere and I am stuck in one place unable to escape…and, as you can see, I am given to the melodrama that such a comparison lends itself to.  It does feel like I’m stuck in a melodrama.  One of my own making, I freely admit, but one nevertheless.  I am struck by highs and lows day-by-day, week-by-week.  The highs don’t peak too high, it must be said, but the lows…man, they are a sheer drop and take an awful lot of effort to climb back up from.

Realising I am this composite man is curious.  I am fractions and oddments from all this time; I am not a whole but an ever changing construct – one that can consciously dissemble elements now obsolete – though one, it seems, with a blind spot for worth and penchant for melodrama.