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AN OLD PAIR OF SOCKS

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.


© Copyright Dark Poets Club

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