The Shirt I’ve Kept

I’ve been carrying this t-shirt for years. It’s got your picture on the front. I wear it under other clothes mostly, pulled out when nobody’s watching, which is probably the worst reason to keep something like that. But that’s how things stick around—buried, private, heavier than they should be.

These are the streets I’ve walked too many times. The corner where we fought about nothing. The bar where you showed up with someone else and I didn’t flinch fast enough. The bench where I said everything wrong. You’d say I’m a snob about some things and a complete mess about others, and you’d be right. I hold onto things the way other people hold grudges.

I don’t know what I was trying to prove, wearing your face close to my skin like that. Maybe just that something real happened once. That we got through to each other, at least for a while, and that was worth the weight of keeping it around.