I was sitting at my desk the other day, reading the manuscript on it with my back to the door. My eyes kept navigating to the back of the room though -- I still don't know if it's acceptable yet to have my feet up on the desk while I read. But having your legs up is good for your circulation. I have terrible circulation, and my hands are always cold. And people at the office leave their doors open so I feel I should do the same (I've only been interning there for a week now). I was definitely more comfortable with my feet up, although the straining of my ears to catch the onset of incoming footsteps, I think, made me lose more time in the end.
I had my feet crossed on the desk when I noticed the gap in the seam on the heel of my left boot. I knew it was there; I hadn't forgotten it, I just simply took note of it now that it was in the context of this new surrounding. I've had these boots for about five years now, and I wear them almost everyday. They are brown leather cow-boy boots. They aren't the stubborn kind; the top part is malleable. I can wear them taught right up to my knees, or scrunched around the lower part of my shins. The leather that covers the feet is now a much darker shade than the rest due to rain, mud, sticky juice, alcohol and whatever else I've walked into. People have often asked me if they are Gucci because of the green and red tag-thing that sticks out of their tops. They are not. But they aren't real cowboy boots either. It is clear that they were designed as a fashion article but they have still proved to be the most useful item I own. I can wear them with almost anything and they are comfortable. They are also in a pretty shitty condition right now. After the second year I started to periodically bring them in for mending and polishing, refusing to ever throw them out. But I haven't done it in a while, I realized.
Why? I have been
meaning to. But I mean to do a lot of things, as I'm sure many people do. But the fact that I was sitting there in an office without having done it worried me, because I must have at some previous point, subconsciously and precisely, decided that it shouldn't! And I could no longer be assuaged by the convention that, often times, people put things off. I started to catalog my clothing in my mind. I know that I have shirts with tiny stains, skirts with fleeing threads, missing buttons, holes, rips, burns. I know that I wear them too. Why. Why do I do this? Do people notice??? Do I perpetually wear injured things, and people notice and no one says anything, and everyone thinks that it's a product of an abiding negligence? And when exactly did I decide that this was OK? My style is anything but put-together-primp. It's more of an attempt at coordinated-chaos. I never buy anything that matches. I never buy anything I need, only what screams out to me. Only things I love, which more often than not, are things that look best on their own. But that is not an excuse.
I made a plan to fix my boots, and mend my clothes or at least put those that needed mending aside.
Today I wore a skirt that has a tear in it and loose strings, because I didn't know what condition it was in when I decided I wanted to wear it.
At least I wasn't in the office.
