A Year in a Brown Tweed Coat

I bought a brown tweed coat about a year ago. A girl who I considered to be a mythical being finally personified, that is, the alleged best friend for life you meet in college, accompanied me and was extremely helpful since she had once worked at some sort of coat-selling establishment. She told me to stretch out my arms in front of me and make sure the back fit and then walked around the store with me to see if I was comfortable in the tweed coat. Not too hot, not too cold.

I bought the coat because it was getting warm and my winter coat simply seemed too heavy to bear. So I bought the thinner brown tweed and dubbed it my spring coat. It was more autumnal than anything with its dark brown buttons and black spots and it proceeded to do little more than take up space in my small closet for the rest of the year. As it hung forgotten and increasingly pushed to the side by brightly colored spring skirts and tops, my relationship with that girl similarly withered and was pushed to the side by new friendships and increasing amounts of unspoken misunderstandings.

I hung the brown tweed coat up on a metal hook at my still relatively new job today and for a moment pondered it. I bought the coat about a year ago, but never really used it much until this winter. My heavy black winter coat now simply seemed too warm and too dreary to come out very much and the brown tweed has become a daily part of my wardrobe. I looked at the brown tweed coat on that metal hook that would have been utterly foreign to me a year ago and is now so familiar and was struck by how much can change in a year.

A year ago, this now slightly ratty-looking brown tweed coat was completely new. The buttons were firmly sewn to the coat and didn’t dangle in a worn way when not in use. The pockets didn’t sag out a little bit from stuffing too much in them and there was no pilling on the arms. A year ago, I had this friend who I thought was going to finally be the one to carry forward. I had a great apartment and great roommates and I was a student, and all that entails. Now I come to work and hang my brown tweed up on that crowded metal hook five days a week and I haven’t heard from that friend in over half a year. School is something that exists in the past and future for me, but not in the present, and most of the people I knew there have ebbed away.

This isn’t to say everything is now a dreary overcoat. Oddly, even though retrospectively I feel like I had it all a year ago, I’m vastly more optimistic in this January moment than I was that January a year ago in Target as I perused the coats, tailed by my friend. There is more hope now and less bleakness. There are fewer friends, but more keepers. There’s a smaller apartment, but a bigger possibility. There is a thinner, more worn coat, but I like to think I have more places to hang it.