you can't wear 100 purses at once

a poem on friendship & its impossible questions

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

This morning I’m thinking of purses, of the kind that hang in the back of the closet and hold little oddities [silent, patient, sighing] of moments from before that were true-as-true-could-be when they happened, but now have been hung up, pushed toward the inner recesses of darkness by our favorite cardigans, those linen pants that get wrinkles, that jumpsuit that smooths our soft belly by some stroke of black magic.

Last weekend I shoved my hand into the back of our closet and fished my black crossover off its hook. I dumped it upside down on the bed and out came a full pack of gum, an old business card, my best lipstick, a hair tie. I reached my hand in and pulled out a fistful of memories. This little purse had been waiting all this time—waiting til I finally fit into that hot little leather jacket from Florence again, til I’d found myself in the right mood to wear an impractical bag with impractical shoes so I could lean on my husband and feel impractical, too.

And as I look at damp rusted leaves against blue-teal atmosphere, feel the shifting of seasons like tectonic plates grinding in my bones, I let my brain do its Rolodex through every friend I have ever loved [even a little], and I have to fight this unexplainable urge to stand up and run into the closet of my life, to pull each of them off their hangers and dump them out on my bed and to clutch their offerings to my nose, my heart, my lips, my ears, because if there’s one thing I can never seem to do, it’s to admit that some purses were meant only for special occasions, and also that you can’t wear one hundred purses at once.