I am not a sentimental person about stuff, except when I REALLY AM.
I mean — I am deeply, embarrassingly sentimental about people. About moments. About the way something felt. But objects? Things? I can throw away a birthday card before the cake is gone and not lose a single night of sleep over it.
And this one shirt… it’s one of those things.
It started, as most great love stories do, in an Aerie fitting room, while I was really shopping for my daughters and telling myself I was “just browsing.” It was a boyfriend tee — that perfectly oversized, nothing-to-prove cut — and the front said oh shucks in the cheeriest little font, and the back was a full-on vintage-style advertisement for an oyster tavern, like something you’d find tacked to a wall in a coastal dive bar next to a taxidermy fish named Gerald.
I bought an XL. I brought it home. I cut the neck out of it immediately — because drop shoulder is the only correct way to live — and I proceeded to wear that shirt to bed and on every lazy day off for nearly a year.
It became the shirt. The one I reached for when I was sick. When I was sad. When I just needed to feel like myself in the quietest, most unperformative way possible. You know that thing where you put something on and your whole nervous system just… exhales? That was this shirt.
And then one day it was just gone.
Not in the laundry. Not under the bed. Not wadded behind a pillow or eaten by the couch cushions. Just — gone. Vanished. The way things vanish when the universe has a weird sense of humor and you apparently needed a lesson in impermanence.
I looked for that shirt the way I look for my keys — first casually, then with increasing urgency, then with full-blown crime scene energy. I retraced steps. I checked weird places. I asked questions nobody could answer.
Eventually, I accepted it. Grieved it, even. (Don’t laugh. If you’re this level of neurodivergent, you understand.)
Fast forward to a random afternoon of online scrolling — the kind where you’re not really shopping, you’re just existing with your phone — and I was on Depop. If you don’t know Depop, it’s a secondhand marketplace where regular people sell things they’ve outgrown, moved past, or just need out of their closet. I love it for exactly that reason. Somebody’s “no longer me” becomes somebody else’s “this is so me it’s alarming.”
And there it was.
The shirt.
Oh shucks on the front. Oyster tavern ad on the back. Aerie boyfriend tee. Same one. Except this one was a medium — which happens to be my size now. (Thank you GLP-1!)
I didn’t even hesitate. I ordered it so fast I’m not sure I actually read the listing.
It arrived today.
The full ceremony of it: an angsty teenage girl, scissors in hand, doing the honors. Perfectly executed drop shoulder. As it should be.
Scissor. Stretch. Slide on.
And y’all — I nearly cried.
Not because it’s a shirt. Because of what it felt like. Warm and soft and immediately, inexplicably safe. Like being handed back something you didn’t realize you’d been missing until the weight of it settled on your shoulders.
I sat there, in my bed, next to my poor husband — who definitely was looking at me like I was an alien — trying not to be a whole person about a piece of cotton, and I thought: some things aren’t lost. They’re just waiting.
But until then?
Oh shucks, y’all. I’m home.
— Moe
