Fashion Aspirin

Since 1959 I have been engulfed in the world of fashion. Because of my mother, I was born to be a fashion maverick. She was a Jackie Onasis/Doris Duke hybrid. Everything about her oozed extreme chic to me. When she lit her cigarette with the large round orange ceramic table liter and dipped her ashes into the matching extra large tray perching on the edge of a mid-century modern coffee table - instant chic. When she cooked at the stove donning black silk shantung cigarette pants and a bright yellow cashmere v-neck sweater, organza apron in tow - instant chic. I could go on and on, but you get the picture. I moved through my life in a series of fashionable clicks. Those perfectly detailed pictures that I had always watched my mother create, had for me begun to slow down. Click...click.....click.......stop. With the economic failure of the country, went the slick and sleek tasks of my days. In June of 2008, I was handed my pink slip, my walking papers. But where was I walking to? Over time, tea and cigarettes became wine and cigarettes. For me, the job market had become almost non existent. No one wanted to hire a 40 something fashion retail burn-out. I tried to spice up my resume using "customer service" as the ageless salt and pepper. Working every angle I could to make myself seem full of fresh young ideas became pointless. Soon I was digging into my inheritance. The money once reserved for me upon my fathers death was now my lifeline. He was not dead, but I had begun to feel as though I were. With my unemployment exhausted, my oldest son in college, my middle son in prison and my youngest son sampling the trials and tribulations of manhood, the pictures of my fashionable life were becoming smaller and smaller, until one day I couldn't see them anymore. What had become of my life? The downward spiral had become too much to take. I had been reduced to drinking cheap wine out of crystal glasses. The libation that these glasses held were a symbol of what I had become, and the glasses themselves, a remnant of what I used to be. My mother died in 1995 of lung cancer and I stupidly smoke cigarettes each day. With each puff of smoke, I see the "fashion maverick" dissipating into thin air. My home has become the cell walls I imagine my son in. Now I don cashmere sweats and hoodies once reserved for fashionable winter outings, only to make myself remember what I once was, what I once had. They disgust me now in their pilling. They have taken the downward spiral along with me. As I look around my one bedroom apartment that I share with my youngest son, I am reminded that, yes, I am surviving. But just surviving is not living. I am also reminded that fashion, for all of its' theories, is a mirror of what we are going through in our lives. It reflects back to us what we were, what we are, and what we can still become. Perhaps if I shave those pills off of my cashmere, put them in the dryer to fluff them up and refresh them, things won't seem so bad when I look in the mirror. After all, you never know what a new day can bring. These days I hold on to those cliched thoughts, and I wonder if I am holding onto hope or just taking a fashion aspirin to ease the pain of the truth revealed. copyright 2008 Perlouez