Kevin Figueroa
April 25, 2015
Multimedia Writing
Professor Erin Anderson
Silent Guessing Games
7:45 a.m. The alarm rings quietly. The tone never wakes me, but my phone’s vibration on my bedside table always does. I sit on the edge of my bed, pick a pillow up from the floor, then stand. My roommate’s iHome flashes 7:52 a.m.; I’ve been late to class twice because it’s seven minutes fast and he won’t change it. I step to my walk-in, wanting to avoid morning closet traffic.
So I’m standing in the dim light of my walk-in closet, wearing nothing but my blue Calvin Kleins. The hairs of my arms stand in the quiet air-conditioned chill of my apartment. I’m surrounded by several dozen shirts that sway gently on their hangars as I peruse them.
H&M graphic tees flash quotes with no meaning: “Shine On,” says one, and the shirt is as hollow as the words on its chest.The Macy’s and JC Penney dress shirts are buttoned to their collars, carrying memories of parties and job interviews, hung with wrinkled sleeves and collars; I only iron the shirts when I plan to wear them. Baggy flannels from my adolescent days as a skateboarder terrorizing Salem sidewalks stand out with their energetic plaid designs, clear white and blue. I never wear these flannels anymore; the boy who did is a boy I have outgrown. These memories are carried in the stitching of my shirts, like they’re sponges soaking up the days I wear them, and reflecting them to anyone who sees.
These recollections are my little things, the things that explode with meaning to no one but myself.
I try on a shirt, look in the mirror, see how it fits me, turn, take it off, hang it up. Try one on, look in the mirror, take it off. Try it on, take it off. On. Off. On. Off.
I wonder if I wear the clothes people who know me would expect me to wear. A bookish English major with brown speckled glasses and a penchant for adopting stray books; disorganized, messy, casual, yet with an air of formality. Is that what people will see, no matter what I wear? Or can I change what people see?
I feel myself looking at my shirts and leaving them saturated with more meaning than they care to hold. A well-ironed collar is intelligence incarnate—a dangerously placed wrinkle, a day gone to ruin. I often find myself repeating that these shirts are just shirts, and mean nothing to anyone but myself.And choosing a shirt is nothing more than what it is. No one will see my skateboarder flannel and picture me knocking over pedestrians on crowded sidewalks, or see poorly lit parties revealed in the beer stain on the hem of my green collared shirt.
Still, I spin circles in my closet, vulnerable, naked. And I can’t help butimagine the eyes of strangers on busy city sidewalks pass over me, imagine them scanning the stories I wear to find out who I am—looking for loose ends, scuffed shoes, faded knees on my jeans. Looking for signposts in my story. Everyone looking through each other as if our shirts were windows. I scoff at the value we place on wardrobes.
And yet, I feel myself doing the same, inspecting the outermost layer of passerby, reading their accessories and band shirts and European-style jackets like some pages and pages of some fascinating, senseless book.
In his novel I Am the Messenger,my favoriteauthor Markus Zusak wrote, “Big things are often small things that are noticed.” He understood the importance of not accepting his life and his surroundings at face value, of taking the small fragments of things we are allowed to see and turning them into our versions of truth, of our reality—even if with a dash of speculation.
Zusak was calling for closer observation of the finer details, the exciting tales to be told about the journeys of t-shirts, the rustle of shirts sliding across hangars, the ways humanity reveals itself to us in the ways we see ourselves and each other. He saw the simple and authentic beauty hidden in the world around us, and believed in truths that may lie beneath our surfaces.
But every coin has a second side. Long before Zusak’sI Am the Messenger, someone cautioned against judging books by their covers; warned that those truths that we keep beneath our surfaces can’t be revealed by their outside appearances. Warned that, tempted as we may be, we can’t believe that what we see is what we get.
We are made up of little things, and we ourselves are smaller than we like to believe. Small to everyone but ourselves.
On. Off. On. Off. I am waiting to find something to wear that does not change my reflection, something that does not change my perception of myself. Looking in the mirror, I wonder what that would look like. An outfit to reflect my true self. An outfit whose every little signpost points only towards the truth.
I wonder if an arrangement of clothing could be so multifaceted.
With a shaking hand, I hold a magnifying glass to the smallest of decisions, applying significance to the simple things that require no justification.Shirts, watches, shoes, I spend time speculating on history based on what little I might know. I know it’s inaccurate; books are not meant to be understood by their covers, shirts are not windows into our selves, people are rarely understood by their exteriors. We play silent guessing games with strangers, using our eyes to scratch on one another’s surfaces, filling in the blanks we see with assumptions and presumptions.
Markus Zusak also wrote that people can be incredibly beautiful; not in looks, or in what they say, just in what they are. Maybe, in my haste to learn all that I can about others, I have made big things out of little things, turned shirts sliding across on hangers to pages of a biography, turning one by one. But though the clothes we wear may reflect pieces of ourselves, they are signposts we place ourselves, pointing in whatever direction we choose—and we may choose to live a life that is not reflected by what we wear.
I’m standing in the dim light of my walk-in closet, wearing nothing but my blue Calvin Kleins. I am cold, but I don’t get dressed yet. I look in the mirror, and I see a bookish English major with brown speckled glasses and a tendency to look too closely too often at too many things; disorganized and messy and aching to understand and be understood. A boy who spends too much of his time trying to see the world and himself through the eyes of everyone around him.
But for now, I stand here, standing in the middle of a floor littered with the faces of memories I don’t want to share. And I’m telling myself that what I wear today doesn’t matter.
I pull on a pair of jeans. I grab my “Shine On” t-shirt. White sneakers, my cross necklace. I try not to think about the dozens of shirts I chose not to wear, and step out of the closet as my roommate’s alarm rings a second time.