It was the best of tees, it was the worst of tees.
Well, not quite. They were both regular black T-shirts. Also,
they weren’t very different. You could mistake one for the other quite easily if
you flipped them back to front. Or if you looked at the front and were illiterate,
maybe. Basically, as I mentioned before, they were both regular black T-shirts.
*****
We first noticed T1 when it mysteriously emerged from the
washing machine.
Now I hadn’t seen any of my cousins actually wear it, but I
hadn’t seen anyone else wear it either, and since the cousins leave behind some of
their clothes every time they’re here, I assumed it belonged to one of them and
promptly adopted it as my own.
T1 was just the kind of T-shirt I like: big, black, unfussy,
and, to put it in one word, extremely convenient. (Okay, two words.) As the months
went by, T1 simply became mine.
*****
A few months ago, a friend of mine came over for a couple of
days, and when he left, he left one of his T-shirts behind. I’d seen him wear it
when he was here, so luckily for him, we just hung on to it (and I didn’t start
wearing it). I told him it was with me, and he said he missed it, and that was
the end of that.
Or so I thought. But boy, was I wrong!
Turned out he threw a fit because he was totally upset and
wanted his Van Gogh T-shirt (let's call this one T2) back.
It wasn’t actually autographed by Van Gogh or anything. If it were, I wouldn't tell him about it; I'd just secretly wear it.
It might be worth mentioning that he didn’t actually throw a
fit (not one that I know of, at least). It's just funnier this way because he
doesn’t seem that temperamental a guy I needed to say that here because he may read this.
Eventually, through some long-winded process that I still
don’t quite get, someone came over to collect T2 and took it to him. It
traveled way more than he did, and that was the last I ever saw of it.
Strangely enough, it was at around this time that my friend who
lives downstairs came home and saw me wear T1. She stared at it for a few
moments and said, “My sister used to have a tee exactly like this.” (Ah, so that's who it belonged to!) She said they'd forgotten about its existence, and we had a good laugh about it.
A few days later, I went to return the washed T-shirt and
was told to keep it. After a few minutes of debating, I figured they really weren’t
going to keep it, so I took it back home.
So, although an autographed Van Gogh T-shirt would have been brilliant, it's not something I would have got anyway. I doubt such a T-shirt exists at all. Besides, to wrap up this story, T1 is a far, far better thing that I own than I have ever done.
P. S. - If you haven't read A Tale of Two Cities, you really should. Dickens at his best, if you ask me, and one of the most brilliant classics ever!