By Isabel Mya

I threw out an old pair of socks today.
This shouldn’t be a big deal,
but I’ve never been good at letting things go.
Clothes, people, arguments; anything.
I cling ‘til I’m grasping at thin air
and digging my nails into the palm of my hand.
I have a tendency to collect – well, hoard – things;
as if I could use old train tickets, used up souvenir pens,
and cards from my 7th birthday to fill in my cracks.
I take more care with a t-shirt I won in a competition when I was 9
than I do my own flesh and bone.
I spent over a year pining for someone who told me
they didn’t love me.
I saved the messages they wrote me
and the idealised versions of ourselves we made in The Sims 4,
and I thought every day about the feeling
of their cold touch on my skin.
The socks I threw out had been wearing thin for some time,
but it wasn’t until I realised I could feel the floor through them
that I decided it was time to let go.
I spent an hour crying before I put them in the bin.
Not because I was devastated or even surprised
to find they’d finally developed actual holes,
but because lately I’ve been feeling exhausted –
thread bare, and on the verge of coming apart at the seams.
I’ve been contemplating whether the world has any use for me,
or if I’m damaged beyond repair.
I think throwing out old socks was my way of committing to tomorrow.
An admission that I deserve better than socks with holes in them,
and a vow to myself to stick around long enough to buy new ones.