Reasons I Kept My Ex-Boyfriend’s Sleep Shirt

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, “Reasons I Kept My Ex-Boyfriend’s Sleep Shirt,” by Monmita Chakrabarti. Monmita is a writer from Columbus, Ohio by way of West Bengal. She recently graduated from Kenyon College with a degree in English and Women's and Gender Studies, and is currently researching reproductive justice at Jindal Global University. Her work can also be found in Joyland Magazine, Bending Genres, and Laurel Moon.

**This is a repost because the original version was e-mailed with the wrong byline.

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One.

I’m never going to find another shirt like this one. It is a men’s extra-large, despite the fact that A is a size small, because it belonged to his dad first. There is an Oompa Loompa styled after the 1971 Charlie & The Chocolate Factory design. It is the biggest, baggiest, softest thing I have. And I've washed it so many times it doesn't smell like him anymore. When I’ve had a hard day, I take a long shower, slather myself in my best-smelling lotion, and let the shirt just swallow me.

Two.

My ex is a libertarian. According to his political philosophy, the distribution of material goods should be decided by the free market. The free market decided I should keep his shirt. It’s mine now. When I asked him about being "socially liberal and fiscally conservative," he said that he wasn’t confident when he talked about politics. He didn’t think it was the government’s place to interfere in the actions of corporations, but he didn’t hate gay people or poor people, and didn’t think he was racist. I hate myself for not being able to tell him that this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I should have sent him the Linda Rose Fregoso article I read about how colonizing, Global North companies in the Global South are killing women of color, neoliberal economic policies in Mexico diverting resources from the public sector to create a lack of protection for the vulnerable, and a humanitarian crisis of femicide. But I know he wouldn’t read it.

Three.

When I had my mental breakdown, I couldn’t stand tight clothes that I could feel against my sides and stomach. The shirt would have been perfect for these purposes, but we were dating at the time, and I felt so much resentment towards him. I was dating him when I began to question my sexuality more critically, as well as when my undiagnosed mental health problems were beginning to be more evident. A was the pinnacle of normality, while I slowly felt less and less “normal.” I thought the way I felt about him was how straight relationships were meant to feel. I couldn’t even look at the shirt or regard it as a source of comfort and protection, as I do now. I read the things I wrote in my diary during this time:

Tell me where to put the anger

I walked to the furthest north point on college property and cried the whole time I was writing this.

I am so, so lonely

There are no descriptions here, no memories of my friends’ actions or my own. I did not write about the mental health intervention they had for me, the day all my friends stopped speaking to me, or the day my roommate moved out of our dorm. The shirt is one of the only things from this period that I could bring myself to keep.

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I imagine myself being interviewed for a late-night talk show. I wear a flattering black dress, a blazer, and heels. I enter stage left, wave at the audience and smile coyly, sit down with my legs crossed at the ankles. I have just published my first book or directed my first film. I beam at a white man with neatly-cut hair who wears an immaculate suit. Somehow, we get on the topic of my college experience—my mental breakdown and the interpersonal conflicts it led to:

What did you say to your friend who started that whole mess?

I told her she reminded me of the worst parts of myself.

That’s fucked up!

I know. I was lashing out to hurt her, but she was so worried about me, and the whole time we were talking I was crying. There were very few times that year that I wasn’t crying.

But after this all your friends abandoned you? 

After they held an intervention for my mental health I texted them, “that intervention was patronizing and you shouldn’t have done it.” And they said, “well, that comment really hurts our feelings,” and that was the end of our friendship.

Do you feel remorse?

 Of course.

*audience claps*

Four.

The shirt makes me feel so delicate and small. My old roommate and best friend, who I will refer to as Rory Gilmore, because she was Rory Gilmore levels of perfect and insufferable, was the most delicate, slender, encapsulation of white femininity.  Every Rory Gilmore is of course accompanied by an underdeveloped Lane Kim, oppressed by her overbearing Asian mother and trying to escape her family and culture. She is a sexless being who marries a dead-beat white guy. We are not meant to think too much about how empty Lane’s life likely is. We are not supposed to think about Lane at all outside of her relationship with Rory. Wearing my ex-boyfriend’s giant shirt makes me feel almost like I embody a white woman—deserving of protection and always the victim.

2019—the year when I went, as my Ma phrases it, “a little cuckoo”—was the year of the tragic heroine who is careless with her life. This was the year that I read Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney and watched Fleabag: two pieces of media about wealthy white women who are terrible to the people who care about them. I told myself when my friends abandoned me that I would be the main character if this was a novel, not them. I wouldn’t be a main character like Rory Gilmore, but one who is messy and selfish and goddamn interesting. Still, despite my selfishness, I would be likable. Repressed, neurotic, and overachieving women would see themselves in me.

The worst thing I did when I was so out of my mind that I struggled to get out of bed in fear of a knife-wielding stranger waiting for me outside my door, and so angry that I punched walls and threw everything off my desk onto the floor in a rage, was to A. To be clear, I didn’t ever actually cheat on him, though sometimes I’m scared that if the opportunity came up, and the girl in my Modernist Literature class who I liked at the time had returned my interest, I would have.  In Conversations with Friends, Frances cheats with Nick on his wife, Melissa. Her intense, secret affair strains her relationship with her best friend, Bobbi, and forces her to confront her flaws. After I broke up with A in a conversation that had months of lead up, but only lasted four minutes, I read on my Twitter feed that emotionally cheating on someone is still cheating. That it is just as bad cheating physically. That if you are not invested in a relationship, it’s cowardly to not just break up with your partner. I felt a pang of guilt. The relationship would have ended sooner if he wasn’t one of the only people I had left at the height of my instability. I think of kisses that were slimy like okra and sweaty palms rubbing my body. When he touched me, it felt medical. I always flinched away. I think of teetering on the edge and how I never felt like I could access my own mind.

I think about his mother, a kind, tall woman with a booming laugh, who must hate me now for how I treated her son. Rory Gilmore’s mother probably hates me too. 

In Conversations with Friends, Frances wrote Bobbi a long email apologizing for being an asshole. Bobbi accepts this olive branch and shows up at Frances’ door. I wrote the friends that I hurt handwritten letters apologizing, thinking that would be more personal than an email, but I never got any response from any of them. Brown girls, when they snap, end up friendless and alone. Brown girls aren’t allowed to mess up like that.

Five.

I never run into him, so it would be a great inconvenience to figure out how to return the shirt. We were long distance from the start. He was going to school an hour away. A lived with my best friend from high school on the nineteenth floor of a dorm that fit more people than the number that attended my small liberal arts school. This is where we met. During the summer we started seeing each other, he would drive an hour from Dayton, Ohio to my suburb in Columbus. He would be the one to always make the trip because I hated driving. During the school year, I would try to go home to Columbus as much as possible to see him, even though I had such intense anxiety before I did that I would make myself sick. Part of this was due to the fact that Rory Gilmore made fun of him relentlessly, of his baby face and thin stature. I couldn’t bring myself to love him, though he said he loved me and made me a bouquet of roses out of paper and read my favorite book and drove long distances to see me. My Ma adored him, probably because she understood he could never really hurt me. It was my first real relationship where we called each other “boyfriend and girlfriend.” 

I am in some ways lucky that our relationship was long distance and now I don’t have to choose my foot paths at college to avoid him like I do Rory Gilmore. She influenced so much of my relationship with him. My sex education was informed by my Ohio public school, meaning it was essentially nonexistent. The first time I learned to put on a condom was in my freshman year dorm, when Rory Gilmore said, “Honey it’s about time you learned,” before rolling one onto the handle of her hairbrush. I recounted this story tearily to Ma during one of the many weekends I went home to Columbus that semester. Ma said, “You were such good friends. You should try to reach out to her,” but she had already blocked my number.

Six.

Compassion fatigue is a physical and emotional condition that leads to burnout, exhaustion, and difficulty empathizing with others. It is often referred to as the “negative cost of caring” or “secondary trauma.” This phenomenon is often seen in care-workers, who are historically underpaid and overworked women of color. The act of care, though necessary, often involves physical and mental exploitation.  

Throughout my sophomore year of college, I volunteered with an organization that provided meals and academic tutoring to middle school-aged children who were in Juvenile Court. Because they were all diagnosed with various mental illnesses, they received the opportunity to be in this rehabilitation program. All of the children in this program were white, save for one light-skinned Black girl. Considering Black youth make up 35% of juvenile court cases and 54% of these youth are judicially transferred to adult court, mental health issues and forgiveness for them are firmly a white thing. Most of the kids were in foster care, and I was one of the only people they could rely on seeing consistently, who would be there for them no matter what. Volunteering with these children, whose lives seemed to be falling apart in a new way every week in a time when I could barely keep my own life together, heightened my anxiety to the point where my heart pounded like I was being hunted for prey when I lay in bed every night. I learn techniques to manage my anxiety:

Deep breath in. What can you touch? What do you see? Where are you right now in this present moment? Are you safe? You are never safe.

I was constantly irritated and emotional and paranoid that my friends hated me, snapping at them until they actually did. Another symptom of Compassion Fatigue is finding oneself numb to the way your actions affect others. It was only after the fact, when I could look back on my situation, that I realized Compassion Fatigue was what I was experiencing.

I was numb to my relationship too. There was a period of time when I would not speak to A, hoping he would end things with me before I had to end them with him. With a long-distance relationship, it is so easy to avoid someone. During our very short break-up-call, I remember telling him, “I’m just so unhappy,” my voice breaking. It was true. I was unhappy enough to look forward to being on dating apps again.

My therapist told me after the fact, that it is kinder to break up with someone on a Friday than on a Sunday, because then they have the weekend to recover. I wish I had not broken up with him on a Sunday. I am too ashamed of this to face him and return his shirt.

Since Frances from Conversations with Friends is received more positively than I could ever be, I find myself identifying with different unlikeable, female media figures. The Sri Lankan Tamil rapper M.I.A is known for her bad behavior alongside her music. Her antagonistic relationship with the media came to a head when she flipped off the camera at the 2012 Super Bowl and Madonna called her an irresponsible “teenager.” She is also characterized as a “Sri-Lankan party girl” or a “cheerleader for terrorism.” When I spoke to a friend about M.I.A’s born-again Christian rebirth and her visions of Christ that made news recently, he referred to this as the “bad kind of crazy,” as opposed to the unhinged anger towards injustice that endeared her to us as young, queer people of color. I wonder if it is hypocritical to begrudge her this newfound spiritual peace after a life of abuse and turmoil. Unlike figures like Taylor Swift, who capitalize off of white-woman victimhood, she is seen as brash because of the way she is raced and gendered as a subaltern woman. She must always be the “Angry Brown Woman” who cannot make informed political statements, instead of a victim of her circumstances. My mental breakdown may not have been rooted in the fact that all my friends at the time were white, and I was always trailing behind them ignored and misunderstood, but it was undoubtedly a factor.

The rapper Monaleo leans into her inevitable reception as angry, portraying the anger of the “Angry Brown Woman” as justified. She sings about unapologetic bad behavior in a way that is so smart and funny. In her songs, She cheats on her sexual partners and beats up other women. She counters the stereotypes Black women as endlessly giving, maternal figures who will take any abuse. I cannot help but be empowered by this selfishness.

Seven.

The shirt lets me create a romanticized version of myself. It is exactly something the quirky lead in a romantic comedy would wear. The kind of lead you could project anything onto. I envisioned myself as Summer from 500 Days of Summer—desired by everyone. Though realistically, my behavior was more in line with Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding—self-sabotaging and selfish.

I mostly dated A because he was kind to me, and I wasn’t that attracted to him, but I didn’t think this was a sufficient enough reason not to. He projected most of the things he liked about me onto me. He loved Star Trek, so I must have loved Star Trek, he was fiscally conservative, so I must have also been. After we broke up, he wrote me a letter and sent me a picture of it, trying to get closure. He sent me periodic texts asking if we could please talk again, can you please just talk to me? I always firmly said no. He loved a version of me I couldn’t stand. Speaking to him again would bring her back to life.

When my roommate moved out, she didn’t tell me in person or warn me. She called me the day of and said, “We’ve been bad friends, but I just don’t know how to help you.” I was in the school bookstore with Jackie, my only friend left at the time, and I imagined Rory Gilmore with her stuff packed, ready to move into her temporary, “emergency” single, and I collapsed into Jackie’s arms and burst into tears.

When I wear the big shirt, I am more accommodating, more invisible. When I lost A and Rory Gilmore, it was a realization of how much I was capable of hurting people if I tried, how much they could hurt me. Now, I tiptoe around my friends, I am overly apologetic, I do not stand up for myself enough. The big shirt swallows me and makes me smaller. Now, Rory Gilmore crosses the street whenever she sees me and I feel simultaneously invisible and like I take up too much space. I tell myself she is just making herself look racist, crossing the street when she sees a brown person, and I feel better. I remember when she joked about Indian people being incestuous and asked me a pointed question about “slums” in Africa, and I grow frustrated and sad. I go home, curl up in the shirt, and disappear for a while.

My friend Pritish says he loves me so deeply for the same reason Rory Gilmore grew to hate me. He loves me because I am “nuts.” I am always only half existing in the present, my mind always elsewhere, my actions manic and impulsive. He feels this is a rebellion against “functioning” in this violent, capitalist society. I tell him that if I wasn’t taking medication and in therapy, I would be skin-and-bones and losing my hair in clumps and incapable of getting out of bed in the morning. I cannot romanticize this part, no matter how hard I try. It is just miserable. I don’t think it’s something I should be loved for, but in some senses he is right. How can you look at the horror, pain, and suffering in this world and remain sane?

Eight.

I never got my stuff back either. Not that I gave much to him, but I miss my annotated copy of Good Omens and all the scrunchies I left in his room.

These are the Things A Gave Me:

• A neon orange, Oompa Loompa sleep shirt

• A portable charger because my phone always died on our calls

• Handmade paper roses that couldn’t make me love him

• A college robotics t-shirt he got from the Engineering department at Ohio State

• A deluxe edition of The Princess Bride that he said was a gift for me, even though it’s his favorite book

All in the back of my closet. All the things I’ve lost.

I can’t look at these objects the same way now that I’ve cut A out of my life. I imagine him meticulously folding each rose petal with his long, dexterous fingers. His shy smile and baby face. These are objects with voices. They speak of who I used to be when I was nineteen and so hurt and so angry. These are objects that someone who loved me left me, objects that remind me I am capable of being loved.

Nine.

I only kept one thing from Rory Gilmore. A plastic Stegosaurus we got on Freshman Move-In day, who we decided would be the mascot of our room. We named him Steg Ass Saurus and he lived on top of our microwave. He saw us through every late-night talk and every argument. He watched us get ready for parties together, stress over tests, get high for the first time. He was there when we ate chocolate on the floor of our dorm and she told me about how her dad’s best friend committed suicide over winter break, how she had to take care of her mom her whole life, how all the guys she’s dated have mistreated her. Now, he sits on my childhood bookshelf in front of my young adult romances, just another relic of my past.

Maybe it’s not okay that I kept A’s Oompa Loompa shirt. Maybe it’s selfish. Maybe he tried to call me all those times to ask for it back. Nine months spent loving someone and so many items lost to them. I do not care. I do not want to be the bigger person. I should be allowed to be selfish and immature. I have time to mess up, time to grow and heal from my mistakes. I deserve something to hold onto, to remind me that someone will love me again, because when you love someone, you give yourself to them and let them take from you.