I have a bag of my Grandad's shirts in my studio. He wore a button up shirt every single day until he was hospitalised. It’s a Marks and Spencers bag inside a freezer bag. He loved M&S. Good quality - that'll last ya, love. The double bagging is an attempt at preserving him - the smell of his hug, of his home. I wear one of his shirts when I work. Pouring concrete and sweating until all I can smell is myself. Layers of generations soaked into the same shirt. Sometimes I open the bag just to get that whiff of the man who could always remind me who I am and what I’m made of. You’re a Griffiths - don’t forget that my love, chin up. There’s a risk in each opening of the bag. Such a precious resource wont last forever and each sniff uses up some of the magic. There’s sweat stains in some of the collars. I’ve cried into them as if the combination of my tears and his oily stains somehow connect us in this physical realm.
I have a similar ritual with lovers. That makes me sound like an obsessive, stalker type. I’m not. I promise. A typical lover-girl, I cherish the scent of a person on my sheets, a flashback of my arm in his hand while we sleep. When my ex travelled for work I’d strip the bed and not wash the bedding until he came home. Just in case. I’ve been afraid that I’ll never love like that ever again. Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe I’m a psycho and I’ve hidden it well. Until now. Maybe I’m a dateline episode waiting to be written. My birthday is in November. IYKYK.
Given current world events, sometimes my strange little lover-girl ritual doesn't seem so crazy. We’re seeing images of people wrapped in sheets on the news. War, starvation, neglect, man-on-man atrocities. I get cosy in my bed. Seeking comfort and solitude within the very thing that wraps a dead body. We all want a place to sleep at night. A place to download, to be safely cocooned from the harsh outside world. Fabrics are beautiful webs for catching and holding the ephemeral nature of our memories, our bodies, and our relationships. They capture our streams of conscious physicality - expensive sleep sprays, essential oils, greasy hand cream. They hold physical expressions of unconscious states; the things our bodies secrete when our knowing mind is unaware - sweat, blood, oil. They support our experiences in between realms - moments when the conscious day reaches a crescendo and the body expels them; dreams, nightmares, sex, cycles. Processes of letting go all captured in the woven threads.
In Year 10 Religious Education class, Mr. Holt, explained that we are all interconnected because we’re all breathing each other in all the time. The air around us is filled with tiny little particles that have been passed around, through different bodies - skin cells, moisture particles, dust. It was the same class where we talked about what it might mean to get pregnant as a teen. I’m not sure how those things are related but it stayed with me. Breathing someone else in. Yuck. And yet, I’ll breathe in my lovers armpit for as long as he’ll allow it.
My sheets have told many stories about all different parts of life and loss and love and grief and silence and comfort and peace. The sheets in my studio often tell other people’s stories. I pick out bedsheets and pillowcases from charity shops, wondering what it takes for someone to discard their used bedding and give it away. Who are they no longer wanting to remember, what life occurrence happened to make them wrap up their sheets and drop them off for someone else to find. Who, other than my sentimental self, is buying second hand bedsheets? Sometimes I wonder whose nightmares are here, what lover might have been lost, what new bedroom decor replaced this one? Did they repaint the walls? Who died and left this weird stain. It all feels so gross and so human at the same time. These strange intimate fabrics wrap us up from birth to death, and hold us in the moments where we are most honest. One day we’ll all be wrapped in a sheet unable to smell the process of what it means to be alive. So here’s to sniffing each other, breathing in the life around us. Processing and recycling moments that seem so mundane and so serene all at once.