The T-Shirt With the Frayed Collar

Saturday morning, half past six, I stood on the balcony wringing a grey t-shirt over the clothesline. Water dripped, one drop at a time, into the plant pot below. The early sun slanted through the edge of the cotton, and I saw that the collar had frayed, its threads loosened into a thin fuzzy border.

Last week a friend saw me wearing it to the market and said gently, "The collar's gone, just buy a new one, it costs next to nothing." I laughed, and thought she was not wrong. But back home I stood in front of the wardrobe for a long time, and what I thought there became the few stanzas below.

This poem is not here to say buying a new shirt is wrong, or that keeping an old one is a virtue worth praising. Nobody is asking you to feel that you have enough. It only looks at one familiar thing for a few minutes.

The collar frayed sometime last year,
the threads loosening bit by bit,
like a brushstroke
the cloth changed its mind about.

Every morning I find it
on top of the pile,
the smell of Saturday sun
still caught in the weave.

Once I stood at the wardrobe
looking at the new shirts,
each one flat and straight,
each one not yet knowing me.

My arm slides into the old sleeve
without asking the way.
The shoulders already know their place,
like a familiar alley
that needs no light.

I am not saying enough or not enough.
I only say:
today,
this shirt
still holds me.

Reading it again, I see the poem is not about the shirt. It is about the feeling of something so familiar that I forget it is working for me. A frayed collar is not a flaw to fix, and it is not proof of contentment either. It is the trace of a great many mornings nobody noticed.

Maybe your thing is different. A cup with a chipped rim, slippers worn down at the heel, the plastic chair on the porch. What they share is this: the object is still working, and you have not said anything to it.

How to tell you did it right is that you finish writing without needing to conclude anything. The first time, many people find it faintly funny to talk to a shirt or a cup, and some feel shy. After a week, some start noticing other things in the house quietly doing their work, while others simply write once and stop. Both are fine. On a busy day, only the third line, two words.

The easy place to slip is turning those three lines into a declaration: "From now on I will never buy anything new." It sounds lovely, and it is tempting because we want the exercise to have a big result. But these three lines are only thanks, not a vow. Tomorrow you can still buy a new shirt, and nobody owes anyone anything.

If you want to keep going in this direction, small joys during the day is a piece on the same habit of looking again. And if you bristle at being told to "be grateful for what you have," gratitude is not feeling lucky is worth reading too.

If you write it and feel nothing, that is fine. Some people are not suited to poems and need something done with the hands: wash that shirt more slowly, wring it out onto the line and watch it dry. Same job, different place to put it.

I am wearing that shirt today. The collar still fuzzes out a little.