There’s a junk shop close to where I live.
I like to stop by there, every now and then, to browse the aisles of plates and shoes and photo frames and books and silverware.
When I was about 17, my mum bought me a pair of really cool, grey trousers from an expensive clothes shop.
At the time, she was being treated in a private hospital for depression.
She’d gone out shopping to buy me the trousers with a girl who suffered from anorexia.
She was called Victoria, I think.
I met Victoria once and remember that her eyes were like black bore holes, drilled into her head, and the skin drooped from her shoulders like chicken meat hanging off a bone.
Victoria helped her pick out the trousers.
The trousers I wore to my mums funeral, only a year later.
I kept hold of them for years after.
Couldn’t bear to throw them away.
I would often run my fingers over the fabric, knowing my mum had held them in her hands the day she chose them for me.
One day, I put them in a bag and took them to a junk shop.
I didn’t want to look at them anymore.
Too painful.
I still think of those trousers.
I wonder where they are and who bought them.
A story of a mother and daughter remains weaved into the very fibres of the fabric.
Untouched.
Forever more.