Old Patterns
In the new world all of our shirts will have past lives, secret histories and energies, pieces of people who wore them before. In the new world our shirts will be sewed once and then resold, like a house or a car, until they can no longer stand, and then their parts will be spun into new shirts. This is the way it used to be and should have always been. But there were many distractions in the middle of the 20th century and people, for a time, forgot.
In the new world we will hire mediums to tell us what our shirts have to say to us. The old thoughts we are carrying on our backs, the patterns we need not repeat. This may seem like a high tax to pay for an old shirt, but the energies of the old new shirts, the ones made so immediately and so carelessly, were far worse. Pure evil, even.
In the new world I give you a shirt named Jane that I had gotten from a woman named Halley who had gotten it from another woman named Cate. Jane was made in the ways of the new world - thoughtfully, sturdily, ready to withstand the complex lives of many women. Their desires and choices, their furor and their failures.
Jane
In Jane’s fourth life she was a florist who sometimes delivered lunches to people in her car, warm and wafting with conflicting aromas, a fine way to spend the winters while the soil slept. She was half in the natural world and half out - fluent in the flora and the fauna but also reliant on engines and apps and artificial meats. This ratio worked okay for a time - by the end of the flower season she was sunburnt and sore and ready to sit in a seat and press a button and move without moving; by the end of the winter she was ready to crouch and dig and stare at the bees and eat like a deer from her garden. But there was one day, one delivery, an upset man and cold brew with coconut milk all over her face, a man-made shout and a man-made shame, that changed the course of this incarnation. The coconut milk left a small stain on the upper right sleeve, but she made sure to sage the shit out of it before her new life.
Sandrine
Sandrine was designed and made in Los Angeles, but given a French name to appeal to a certain kind of woman. A woman who aspired to fewer, better things. A woman who spit in the face of a short cut. A woman who had children who didn’t threaten her life as this woman. A French woman who moved to Los Angeles, maybe, or a woman who wanted to be a French woman who moved to Los Angeles. Malgré tout, Sandrine’s first life was in Montana, as a paralegal who always packed her own lunch.
Sandrine had done the things that she was supposed to do - a steady job, a modest home, no debts to speak of - and so it was her secret hope that in her second life she would have the courage to set it all on fire, to walk into the office and put her cigarette out on those two men's names, to pack up her car and head west, Rosetta Stone blasting through the windows like a Tom Petty song, au revoir, au revoir, au revoir.
Florence
Florence, currently in her third life, passed down exclusively through her own family - grandmother, mother, daughter - was an out of work writer who was struggling to help her daughter learn to read. In her she carried the choices of two mothers before her - their sacrifice, their striving. In her first life, Florence went back to work when her daughter was a toddler. The daughter blamed the bulk of her shortcomings on this decision and made a vow, in her second life, to never let this happen to her own. In her third life, Florence split the difference, worked part time, mothered part time, never fully in either thing, sounding out letters while trying to write, sentences forming during bedtime stories. She wished she could just give her daughter a brand new shirt, a shirt with no name and no past, bleach-white, button-pressed, arriving tomorrow. But she was in her third life now, and she knew better.