I know of a woman who clearly has much better taste in men than I, for she gets her paramours to cook for her and then absconds with their recipes. The result: “The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook: They Came, They Cooked, They Left… (But I Ended Up with Some Great Recipes).”
I wish.
Not only have my exes failed to cook for me—gourmet or otherwise—they have also, collectively, neglected to ply me with flowers or jewels or any other worthwhile commodity. I have, however, accumulated my fair share of their clothing.
My college boyfriend had a Land’s End sweatshirt, navy blue, extra large, that I loved at least twice as much as I ever loved him. During our four-year courtship it became evermore frayed at the edges, as did the boy and I, but given that the sweatshirt was reinforced with double-bound seams at every opening it absorbed the damage in ways we, as a couple, could not. The day after graduation I left the boy behind in Alabama and took the sweatshirt with me to Guatemala, where I spent every night for over two years of my Peace Corps tour wrapped in its warm embrace. Of all the things stolen from me there— my money, my innocence, my sanity—I miss that sweatshirt most of all.
Then I got married. And my husband…what can I say? He left me with a pile of dirty laundry, in every way imaginable.
My post-divorce boyfriend relinquished his entire wardrobe to my possession when he deployed to Iraq. One particularly wistful day I bedecked myself in his West Point T-shirt and proceeded to bury my nose in every item of his left-behind clothing, inhaling the sweet scent of him that still hung about his clothes. In the process, I realized he had a particularly egregious sense of style; how this knowledge escaped me before is, I believe, less a result of my errant observational powers and more a result of the fact that he spent most of his time in uniform or (ahem….) in various states of undress. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, I sent him an email letting him know that if he ever hoped to get lucky again, we’d have to go shopping to refurbish his wardrobe the minute he returned stateside. Shortly thereafter, I learned that his sartorial shortcomings were not, in fact, having the debilitating effect I’d predicted, as he had a string of women crying into his West Point T-shirts from one end of the world to the other. I admit that I immediately deposited his entire wardrobe into a nearby dumpster. I’m not proud of my response but should note that my regret has less to do with any negative reflection this spiteful act casts on me and more to do with the fact that, in hindsight, I realize it probably did more to advance his sex life than hamper it.
Most recently, my high school boyfriend reappeared in my life on the heels of our 20th reunion, when we launched the redux that was oh-so-much more satisfying than the first time around. He had muscles this time, real ones, and filled out his Under Armour in ways I hadn’t thought possible when we were teens. But there are 2,779 miles between Oregon and Virginia, and eventually the distance caused…well…distance. About four months after his last visit, rooting through an underutilized drawer for some lightweight summer pjs, I found the Under Armour he had worn everyday, under any- and everything. Pinned to it was this note: “I will always love you.”
And I will always love them, all of them, in one way or another, regardless. Which is why, in the end tally, though I part with the men, I always hold onto their clothing.
Ellen Urbani is the author of a handful of short stories Google will never let die, as well as the memoir WHEN I WAS ELENA, which describes the years she lived in Guatemala at the end of that country's long civil war. She is an avid runner, a hip momma, a terrible singer, and a sucker for well-dressed men. She also suffers an ongoing addiction to black-and-white horizontally-striped dresses that should be all wrong but instead are oh-so right. (On her form, if not on her pocketbook.) Check her out at: http://www.ellenurbani.com/
The views expressed in this blog are solely those of Ellen Urbani and do not necessarily reflect those of Goodwill of Greater Washington or the DCGF.
