The Garment as Witness

There is a jumper in my wardrobe that should have gone to the charity shop about ten years ago.

It was from Primark. It wasn't expensive. It wasn't particularly special even when it was new. The sleeves have always been too long, it doesn't really fit me anymore, and there are holes underneath the arms. I would never wear it out of the house. By every reasonable measure, I should get rid of it.

And I have tried.

That jumper has been in and out of the charity shop bag more times than I can remember. Every so often I'll decide I'm finally being ruthless. I'll pull everything out of the wardrobe, make piles, fill bags, and eventually I'll get to the jumper.

I don't wear this. In it goes.

Then, sometime later — sometimes minutes, sometimes hours — I'll go back into the bag and take it out again.

I can't do it.

Because that jumper went to Malaysia with me.

It went to the Cameron Highlands, where the air actually turns cold at night, unlike anywhere else on that trip. It was there when I got bitten alive by bed bugs in one particularly memorable hostel. It was the thing I reached for and pulled over my head every evening when the temperature dropped and the dorm room got that particular kind of chilly you only really feel when you're a long way from home and the blanket isn't quite enough on its own.

It was there for a version of my life that feels both completely mine and strangely far away now. Before children. Before the life I have today. When I could pack a bag, get on a plane and find myself somewhere on the other side of the world, itching from bed bug bites and pulling on the same cheap jumper every single night regardless.

It came home again carrying nothing visible from the journey, and yet somehow it has never quite stopped belonging to it.

The strange thing is that I don't feel this way about everything I owned then. Most of those things have disappeared without ceremony. Clothes have been donated, worn through, lost, replaced. I couldn't tell you what happened to most of them.

But this ridiculous Primark jumper survived.

There is research suggesting that possessions can become attached to autobiographical memory — that certain objects help us access parts of our own life stories. Clothing seems particularly good at this. Perhaps because we don't simply own clothes. We inhabit them.

And I think that's what I've been struggling to put into the charity bag all these years.

Not the jumper.

Me. Or at least, a version of me.

The woman who wore it in the Cameron Highlands, scratching at bed bug bites, pulling it over her head every night without a second thought, doesn't exist in quite the same way anymore. I've become a mother. I've built things and abandoned things. I've got older. My priorities have changed. My body has changed. My life bears almost no resemblance to the one I was living when that jumper was being stuffed into a backpack.

But the jumper is still here. Older too. More worn. Slightly falling apart.

There is something strangely comforting about that.

We talk a lot about whether possessions are useful. Decluttering almost always begins with practical questions. Do I use it? Do I need it? Does it fit? Would I buy it again?

My jumper fails almost every test. No, I don't really use it. No, I don't need it. No, it doesn't fit properly. No, I certainly wouldn't walk into Primark tomorrow and buy it again.

And yet none of those questions gets anywhere near the reason it's still in my wardrobe.

Maybe some things eventually stop being useful and start doing a different job. They become witnesses. They were there.

That jumper can't tell me anything about the Cameron Highlands that I don't already know. It can't remember the bed bugs, or the cold, or the version of me who didn't think twice about pulling on the same jumper every night in a hostel dorm on the other side of the world. It doesn't know that woman would eventually come home and build an entirely different life.

But I know. And perhaps that's enough.

One day I'll probably pull it from the wardrobe again. I'll notice the holes underneath the arms have got worse. I'll look at those ridiculously long sleeves. I'll tell myself that this is getting absurd.

I'll put it in the charity bag.

I'll walk away.

And then, almost certainly, I'll come back and take it out again.

Some things aren't difficult to let go of because of what they are. They're difficult to let go of because of who we were when they were ours.