The Thread of The Torn White T-Shirt

THE THREAD OF THE TORN WHITE T-SHIRT – published in ONTHEBUS, Issue 25, Bombshelter Press

Honest to God, if I didn’t know the world was shit, I’d be cracking open the cork of a bottle of Cristal right now. I’d be on my bed like the Queen of England. The salty air would come and go through my bedroom window as it pleased and pay no mind to the screen that couldn’t care less about the direction of the air blowing through it. I mean, if I could hit it off with people coming and going like that, I’d pony up. All I’d have to do is keep the mosquitoes out.

My phone is beside me on the table next to my bed. I try to not be distracted by my compulsion to pick it up and scroll on social media.  My beige turtle neck sweater feels lavish on my skin.  Neither the sweater nor I give a rat’s balls about how stylish I look. Well, that’s a lie. I know I look fetching in my turtleneck but it doesn’t change anything. At some point the sun is going to rise like it does every day but why hold my breath when the night feels peachy keen and the temperature is just right? If I didn’t know what was going on in the news, I’d not be troubled by imagined dragons, or lament because my dog was in heat.  Had I misspoken? I’d hate to see my poorly chosen words ricochet into an ordeal. Those old sorrows should’ve been picked up last Tuesday by the sanitation truck and I’m too greedy for the sweet life to pick through yesterday’s trash. If I didn’t see the things I’d been shown, I’d have to look up trauma in a dictionary to even know what it means. If I didn’t lose the things I’d lost, I wouldn’t have noticed they were missing. If my ludicrous plans to outwit an impossible undertaking hadn’t crashed and burned, I might be a crying hot mess instead of free to to run from the matches before they were tempted to strike. The malaise of the day commands my attention like a bratty dictator, while the cool night is my escape from the burning drudgery of the inevitable lockdown of my ill-wrought schemes. Anxiousness intrudes like copper wires through the highways of my brain. On the carpet, there’s a stray thread from the torn white t-shirt I used earlier to clean up the blood from the cut I got trying to bend the metal frames back into place after the dog mangled my reading glasses. Unless I tallied the toll of all the distractions, I didn’t know how much the silence was begging for my attention. I wanted peace more than I wanted to talk. I was in the right place at the right time to speed past the ditch in the road on the Miracle Mile and it was a pleasure to press my boot on the gas. I never needed a better life. I just needed those grapevine sleep talkers to let me live. I sped right past the Shangri-la exit without even looking back and took the shortest route home. If I didn’t know the world was shit, I wouldn’t have noticed it much at all. What the hell? It might have been the best year of my life.

Louise Goffin (February, 2021)