She left again. My youngest daughter, back to Paris with two giant suitcases, this time she sherpa’d herself. We’d shared a little beach apartment in LA for the summer while she interned at GUESS. All summer I shared my GUESS brand stories, beloved articles of clothing from the early 90’s when I worked at Nordstrom. “Oh that floral bra top,” I’d say swooning. “Your dad gave me these black GUESS shoe boots for my birthday the first year we dated. I luuuhhvvved those boots.” I wore them with white scrunch socks and paper bag waist denim shorts. “And that peek a boo brown top with one button and the tassels that I wore to so and so’s 40th birthday party, just a few months after you were born. I luuuhhvvveed that top.” I wonder who has them now.
They are my lost loves, those vetements. When I find something I love, I wear it religiously. My kids on the other hand have unlocked their creative expression through dressing themselves and others. They have “style.” At almost 60, I struggle to find what feels like “me” in the stores anymore, what feels like me even in my own closet.
At almost 60, “what feels like me” is my “Roman Empire.”
My youngest daughter leaving for her second year of university in Paris marks a year of transition into a life I never stopped once in 30 years to imagine. So fully immersed in the now, then, I didn’t think at all what this time in my life would be like. I had no imagination of it or what I would wear.
Her high school graduation was looming so it wasn’t a surprise that I’d be on my own like this. I knew I had to leave, home was a ghost town now. Drawn to the West Coast, for what I am still unclear. An instinctual pull that made no real sense, if one was sensible. Unable to explain it to my friends and family while selling my furniture, putting our memorabilia in storage and saying all the goodbyes.
For nine months I worn same clothes. The capsule wardrobe of a grieving empty nest mother hibernating for the winter. Most of my clothes, my bed and my desk all waiting in a storage POD for me to get to the other side.
I thought for sure I’d have an epiphany as I drove across the country from one coast to another with only my dog, two suitcases, a Spotify playlist and a cooler of snacks. I drove straight through in four days at 12 hours stints, sunrise to sundown, stopping only for gas and bio breaks. Surely I deserved a spiritual download or a Divine Invitation.
I’m here now. On the literal other side of the map trying on “what feels like me.”