Blank T-Shirt

Dearest Rachel –

So I’m standing in front of my closet this morning, trying to decide what to wear. You know the drill; I’ve made four separate quilts out of your T-shirts alone, and we had piles in the sunroom for your fancier dresses. Having choices wasn’t so much of a problem with us; it was a matter of making the choice for the day.

And, of course, in terms of having, I’m not that far behind where you were. Oh, I don’t have the vast array of formal apparel that you collected and kept – men’s dresswear isn’t nearly as colorful or as varied as that of women, after all. In any event, I hated (and still hate) the idea of putting my head in a noose in order to go somewhere fancy – or even just to work. There’s something about that that’s too much of a metaphor for that life. No, give me something comfortable, and I’m content, but over sufficient time – and remember, I haven’t discarded so much of my wardrobe as of yours, because I’m still wearing it – the selection becomes nearly as broad as what you could boast.

Moreover, I’ve added to my collection beyond what I really need just to sort of ‘advertise’ my own designs, for better or for worse. I put that in quotes because it’s not really all that effective in selling anyone else on owning a shirt with my opinions on it – and it’s not as if it matters to me in the slightest if anybody else does.

I’ve gotten to where, when I travel, I almost make a point of being “the funny T-shirt guy” wandering around, which would have amused you no end, since I hardly need to remind you of your own collection. The places we could be going to, the things we could be doing, and the designs and ideas we could be wearing… well, it just makes one wish and wonder.

But this morning, as I’m standing there, I can’t find myself with anything I really want to say at the moment. After thumbing through a half-dozen possibilities, I decide that it’s just as well to let things go unsaid, and pull out a blank shirt to wear instead. Oh, it’s brightly colored – as far as I’m concerned, white tees are basically undershirts, and you wouldn’t go out in public in an undershirt – but that’s all it is; just color and silence.

So it is this morning as I sit in front of my computer, trying to figure out what to say to you. I have something like two hundred drafts of material that I’ve started, but don’t feel like completing or posting to you right now. Some of them are nearly complete, but I don’t dare post them for one reason or another. Others have a skeletal framework, or an outline, and I can’t remember how I wanted to fill them in. And still others have perhaps a single line of text that came to me in the night – or a list of phrases that I thought I would stitch together later – and “later” never came. I mean, “later” could be now, if I wanted it to be, but that’s not what I feel like talking to you about.

The trouble is, I don’t know what I want to talk to you about, even as I know I want to talk to you (as I do every day). Even though I can abide the silence of the morning these days, I do still want to reach out to you, as I used to back in the day. Besides – and you would appreciate this – I’d like to keep up my streak, as I’m approaching two thousand days straight of writing you like this.

But for all that I’ve got things set up for me to finish and send off to you, none of them speak to me at the moment, and I have to come up with something new and interesting. Meanwhile, I can’t say that anything new or interesting has happened recently that I haven’t filled you in on. Even the ordinary day-to-day life has been that much less so; Daniel and I (well, I, anyway – I can’t speak for Daniel, since I don’t know if this problem was throughout the house, or just in our bedroom) retired early last night because the bedroom computer kept disconnecting from the internet. It’s fine now, obviously, but it was a bit of a concern at the time. Still, I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve adapted to the insanity of waiting for a while and then doing the same thing again later (like turning on the computer, hoping it will connect after being given a bit of a rest), and getting the desired different result. It’s funny, in its own way, but it doesn’t really seem all that worthy of comment.

And yet here I am, telling you about it, rather than fleshing out some other story or opinion that I’d started in on once upon a time. Maybe at some point, I’ll haul a few of those old stories out of mothballs and send them to you to get a chuckle out of, but for now, I’m wearing a blank T-shirt, and sending you a meandering text like this that goes nowhere, and hope it brings you back to summer days of doing next to nothing together.