Bravery: Letting Go

[My professor told us to write a piece that we would never show our family. I wrote it. He then told us we had to invest obstructions on our writing and a classmate gave me many obstructions to the prose... I changed what I wrote. I've decided to let the world know my deepest secret... and if my family should read this, read at your own risk. Know I'm not ready to talk about this... I hope my prose are touching, provocative, and worthy of the read. Thank you.]

I look in the bag, staring my past right in the face. There is something about these shirts that makes me remember more than photos or stories ever could. These shirts went through life with me, and nearly from my own vantage point. This shirt experienced my first kiss with a boy. This one I’m going to keep, I don’t even know why I thought I could get rid of it. This one I got in New York after seeing RENT with my high school orchestra. Gonna have to keep that one as well…

I rarely, if ever, wear these shirts, but I can’t give them away. Emptying out my closet was supposed to open up more space for new shirts and such, but I can’t give up memories… right? Especially that shirt. That memory… That one lived through my first experience. It would be easier if that shirt didn’t exist at all… but it remains like a scar: its presence diminished, its power waned, but it would forever be known that it existed to begin with.

Grabbing the shirt out of the bag, I hold it up in front of me and look at it, feel it, remember it.

It’s only a shirt.

It’s a light brown fabric sown together without any logos or designs. It’s a simple shirt.

It knows.

I throw the shirt back into the bag, determined to forget and let go. As the hiss of the fabric sliding down the plastic echoed in my ears, I felt again.  I relived the memory, the reason I didn’t come out sooner. It all began with trust, trusting friendship, a hug, back massage. I trusted touch, until touch turned into disorder. Uncomfortable violation one can’t fight…

I was walking into my best friend’s house. His mother’s boyfriend was there and lounging on the couch like he did. He greeted me as I walked in and eventually asked me to sit next to him. Instantly, I wanted him to be my role model, whether I understood that or not. I trusted him as he put his left hand on my shoulders and squeezed, massaging the twelve-year-old muscles…

The shirt represents the trust I lack in myself… to know when not to trust…

That thing reinforces my distrust in any man I might trust, and if I can’t trust in any man then I will never truly love. It knows why, and it whispers that vision every time it brushes against my skin.

I close the bag. Lift it up. Throw it in the slot. Push it past the too small space. Hear the soft thud within the donation bin.

A whisper rises from the trees behind me and a bird chirps gaily. I get back in my car, role down the windows, and turn on my music and start singing, trying to escape emotions that were buried for so long.