A Shirt for One

Content Warning: Breakups, references to sex

I gave Charlie the shirt a month before he left for Seattle with the promise that he’d bring it back to me when he returned to Bellingham in the fall. A week into the summer we broke up. It was my dad’s shirt that he gave to my mom and so it seemed fitting to give it to Charlie. I imagined the faded black shirt would embrace him in a similar way it embraced my mom, kind of like “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants”. Letting Charlie wear my clothes was a new love language. Instead of affirmations, quality time, gifts, service, or touch; I concocted an original way to show my love: shirt. 

The black long sleeve was from a cafe in Santa Fe called “Cafe Pasqual’s”. On the back of the shirt was a man wearing a sombrero and mustache. Part of me cringed at the stereotype, but I half-soothed this gut feeling with the excuse that both my mom and Charlie were Mexican. Charlie was the kind of person, though, to laugh at the man on the shirt. Often, he’d stay up past three am watching Dave Chappell, and other comedians walk the line between edgy and offensive. He’d blow air through his nose and make small grunting noises when laughing at a joke. I used to wake up in the dark of the early morning to a phone screen illuminating his face, him having not fallen asleep yet. I’d wrap my arms around his small middle, rest my head on his chest and entwine my legs around his legs. I’d feel his chest lift as he grunt laughed at the comedian of the night until I fell asleep again.

Since my dad was the original owner of the shirt, it was big and boxy; built for a man. Charlie, maintaining a frame smaller than most 19 year old boys, swam in the cotton material. Still, it fit him better than it fit me. He was always forgetting to bring extra clothes the nights he stayed in my dorm room-and he stayed most nights. As Charlie spent increasingly more time in my tiny dorm bed, I watched my own clothes dwindle in my closet, and his clothes replace mine. The jokes he liked became my jokes. The people I hung out with, he hung out with. The activities we did, gestures we made, food we ate, became the others. 

I tried to detach myself from Charlie before I was unrecognizable, but it was too late-we were morphing into each other. Often the self I was before I met Charlie would try to pull me away from him. He got angry at my pre-Charlie self for it. When Charlie started to stray, I got angry at his pre-Sydney self. The fear of where I would go, and who I would be without him became more important to me than Charlie himself.

Even though we were so focused on preserving the versions of ourselves we’d manufactured together, we weren’t good for each other. Screaming matches, and drunk jealousy lead our relationship. Sometimes I thought that the reason why we didn’t break up sooner was to avoid grieving the pieces of ourselves lost in the other. My tiny dorm bed seemed so much bigger without him in it; a massive land of cold sheets feeling barren without his presence.

I’d spent the summer after the break up letting Tinder strangers fill me up until I felt full again. I’d tried to replace the smell of Charlie on my clothes with the sweat of different men. Charlie’s memory persevered in my nose. The warm, sweet but boyish scent with a touch of old spice left him too distinct in my memory. He was too clear when I closed my eyes.

My post-Charlie self was an expert at void-filling. Swipe left. Direct message. Cram into the back of a car. Repeat. The search for instant gratification was relentless. It led me to an impromptu three hour road trip to the beach. A harmless adventure of spontaneity if I left out that I’d set out for the trip at midnight and was with a man I’d only seen a handful of times. He was basically a stranger.

The stranger and I ran through the sand illuminated by a cinematically placed full moon. It seemed that no one was awake in the beach town, and it should have been silent. The ocean isn’t one to have a bedtime, however, and the raging of its movement drowned out any quiet. I was glad. I stood ankle deep in ebbing water. With the spray of the ocean salt and the catharsis of its rage I could feel Charlie drifting away from my being. A meteor shower was predicted to be super visible that night. Stars raced across the sky resembling extraterrestrial fireworks, so foreign yet made of material similar to the sand I stood on. As I laid on the chest of a man who was not Charlie, watching stars fly through the sky, I realized that I was completely alone. The Tinder stranger didn’t matter. Charlie didn’t matter. It was just me, in my own world. I could fill up my own world enough.

Charlie gave me back the shirt when I returned to Bellingham. It still smelled like him, but now I smelled different. Throwing it in the washer didn’t bother me like it would have a few months before. I nuzzled my nose into the fabric and breathed in. The familiar smell permeated my nostrils and lungs until I exhaled him out. It was one last gesture of gratitude, appreciating Charlie’s role in my life before saying goodbye palpably. I threw the long sleeve shirt into the moist, metal machine that would strip his smell away. Baptize it from the enmeshed version of ourselves, and feel whole again.