These days

I don’t think very much about clothes. And yet, I have a friend who is a dress historian, and who thinks about clothes all the time. Methodically and elegantly. She pronounces professional but loving opinions about them, locating them in place and time, with the accuracy of a pin-prick. She writes about what they are made of, and how they make history. 

I think I don’t think about clothes. And yet, earlier in this strange year, I purchased (for me) a lot of them, all on the same day. I walked along Brunswick Street, fingers clutching the corded strings of large carry bags, brushing passersby with their cardboard corners.

I imagined a life for the self who would wear those clothes. Perhaps we always do, like picturing our furniture, our lives, in houses when they are Open for Inspection. 

I saw that self in the restaurants and cafes in my neighbourhood, walking down High Street, waiting on Merri Station, catching a train into the city for the literary events that I always intend to attend.

And now they sit in my wardrobe, while each day I pull out the same things to wear. In a succession of shabby days, they will be washed, and put back in, and taken out, and worn again, and washed again, these clothes that aren’t even very comfortable, but are at least undemanding.

I like Twitter, especially these days. Although she sometimes blunders by offering too much intimacy, too desperately, and by making typos, or answering a reply meant for someone else, I generally like the person I am when I’m being my avatar. She is reading a book, and looks serious-minded, but also soft, and well-lit, and she turned up once on the cover of a book by writer I admire. (I confess, I did not enjoy the book very much. Perhaps I saw it as a betrayal).

I tweeted about my daughter telling me one day that she was wearing her ‘good tracksuit pants’, because it made me laugh, and also because, as an adult, she is back home with us, for these shabby days.

So, my looking has turned outwards. Not to those imagined pictures of myself, dressed for my aspirations, but to plants and flowers in the gardens along the streets we walk in the afternoons, crossing the street, or diverting around parked cars, to avoid the people who also walk and look, giving them shy, apologetic glances intended to say ‘you know what I mean’. We walk along Merri Creek, which is singing one day and surging with brown water the next, and I take videos which I will later watch on my phone, and then post on Twitter, as small offerings of peace.