faded/jeans

threads of the past

It’s kind of poetic to wear clothes from a different stage of life.

I can’t go back in time, I can’t become the person I used to be. I can’t call my high school friend who is now dead, and the woman I used to love is now an ex.

Things have faded, changed, evaporated.

I went back to California four or five years after I left. But the wave of nostalgia never came, and somehow I knew I was no longer in the same place. I saw this place as a tourist now.

Those years are gone and so are most of the things I owned then. All I have from that time is a cheap pair of washed-out blue jeans from H&M.

I remember the day I bought them at Del Monte Shopping center, a single story strip mall type place with an interior walkway. It felt like a place that started as a middle class shopping center but slowly became a luxury mall as California pushed everyone else out.

I was unsure whether to buy them. I didn’t love the style, which reminded me of something a washed out rock star, or maybe a country singer, would wear.

But they were the softest jeans I’d ever felt, and so I wore them the next day, before putting them in a closet for years, unsatisfied with how they looked.

Since buying them, I’ve moved nine times across two countries, and I can’t say how many times I thought of throwing them out. Each time softness won out. But something changed after seven or eight years.

I no longer thought of them as something soft but unfashionable. I realized, all of a sudden, in a quiet little way, that these jeans were one of the only tangible items that could connect me to who I was when I lived in Monterey.

He wore those jeans. He equivocated and bought them. That past me, who now seems young, held and wore and washed the sand out of these jeans. He knew change was inevitable, but never would’ve predicted the next decade.

An elementary school friend, who I used to call while walking on the beach, or bicycling, is now one step away from being a stranger—I haven’t heard from him in years. Another friend, who I’ve written about here, took his own life. My girlfriend is now an ex. And my grandmother, who I could call at her home in Iowa, has passed away.

Occasionally I’d walk on the beach at night, wearing those soft, faded jeans, unaware of what was to come.

Now I live in a foreign country, and have new friends I never could’ve imagined meeting. Life is different now. It’s happy, but in a way I never expected, with people that I suppose I was unlikely to ever know.

A few days ago, the jeans ripped. But I’ll have them fixed. I like the idea that some literal threads from my new life would be the thing used to fix something carried from my old life. And they’ll still be soft, in their own imperfect way.

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Who else wears something from the past, even if you didn’t like it then? Let’s talk about it: