Archival Cotton

I have a problem with T-shirts.

I don’t wear them very much anymore. I’ve not been happy with my body in several years, so I find myself hiding under huge sweatshirts and shapeless sweaters for most of my days. In the summer, I wear them, big and long, over black pants and under denim jackets, but it’s the same three black shapeless shirts I bought on sale because I loved them once and was terrified I would never get them again. Maybe that’s some introspection needed about my attachment style, but that’s for another day.

I don’t have a lot of pictures of myself. It’s a constant push and pull as I fight with myself, coliseum style in my head, about liking the way I look despite staring at my face and thinking that my face is too wide and my eyes are too big and my nose is too round and my mouth is too wide. Instead of looking back at old Facebook profile pictures and tracking the development of wrinkles at my eyes and lines in my face, I look at the overstuffed t-shirt drawer in my dresser.

I have a million of them, a collection from the last twenty years of my life. The first bright green West 49 shirt I bought with my own money when I was thirteen. The black and white Billabong baby-doll tee that Raine Maida from Our Lady Peace had his hand on when we took a picture at Much On Demand at 299 Queen Street West. One from the production of The Book of Mormon I saw when it first came to Toronto. Band T-shirts from Young the Giant, Walk the Moon, and a dozen more from other acts.

Events from across Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. They act as a scrapbook of times and places. A tessellation of a life lived in different places, experiences, and memories from a timeline that sometimes feels like it doesn’t exist anymore.

I bought one today, a shirt from one of the oldest Toronto restaurants. Eighteen dollars for an off-white T-shirt advertising catering with the line, “And then call your mother, she’s worried about you.” I saw it and loved it. I remembered that Toronto, ever changing, means this place might not exist forever, but I can have the T-shirt to prove that it was there, and that I was there too.

Some of them I haven’t worn in over a decade, but I still know exactly where they came from. I know where I bought them, who I was with, what the weather felt like that day. I can hold up a shirt and remember the exact version of myself that existed when I bought it.

The shirts remember versions of me that I don’t always want to look at directly. Photographs feel confrontational. I take pride in taking photos of other people and places. I think about the lighting. I try to make sure people will be able to look back and recognize who they were at that moment. But for me, a photograph asks you to look directly at yourself, frozen in time, and decide whether you like what you see. All the unflattering candids that show double chins, blank looks, and open mouths.

A shirt is softer than that.

It sits as it always does, the print cracking and fading, the colour washed out, but still carrying the same memory it always did. It waits quietly in a drawer until you pull it out and suddenly remember who you were when you bought it.

The drawer has become a strange kind of archive.

There are shirts from concerts I barely remember attending. Shirts from trips where the only proof I was there is the faded logo across the chest. Shirts from events that felt enormous at the time and now feel impossibly small. Prints cracking and fading, necks cut out and shortened with kitchen scissors, some too small, some too large, all attached to visceral memories.

Every once in a while I try to clean the drawer out. I pull everything onto the bed and tell myself I haven’t worn these, or my tits haven’t fit into them, since I hit second puberty at twenty-five. It’s time to leave them behind. Surely I don’t need this many shirts. Surely the adult version of me does not need to keep a cotton relic from every concert and every moment of my twenties.

But then I pick one up and remember exactly where it came from.

Sweaty nights at The Rivoli. Obscure art shows at the Gladstone House. Old writer’s shirts from when the Second City Training Centre was in the basement of a Shoppers Drug Mart at King and Peter.

Suddenly throwing it out feels like erasing something. It’s strange the things we keep as evidence of our lives. Retrokid is a perfect example. Nostalgia has become capitalism. I spend money to buy T-shirts and sweatshirts with characters from my childhood, like Loonette the Clown and Polkaroo, or logos like BiWay. More often than not, people comment on them, recognizing the logo and striking up a conversation.

Some people keep photo albums. Some people keep journals. Some people have boxes of letters or scrapbooks or carefully organized digital folders.

Apparently, I keep T-shirts. Proof that I stood in a crowd somewhere in Toronto or New York or Los Angeles, listening to music too loud and thinking about the future in the way you only do when you are younger and convinced that everything is about to start happening.

And while I might not be seventeen anymore, I can pull on a Mutemath tour shirt and remember what it felt like to be nineteen years old, ears ringing on the walk home after a show.

For a few minutes, the shirt still fits the version of me that bought it. The person who stood in a crowd somewhere in Toronto, thinking the rest of life was about to start happening.

Maybe that’s the real reason I keep them. Not because I plan to wear them again, and not because they are particularly valuable. But because every once in a while I can open that drawer, pick one up, and remember exactly who I was when I first pulled it over my head.