The shirt I slept in for a week after the breakup

The morning he left, I didn't change out of his shirt. It was a faded blue button-down that smelled like coconut shampoo and something warmer underneath. I pulled it tighter around my ribs and walked to the kitchen to make coffee. The fabric was soft from years of washing, and I remember thinking how strange it was that a piece of clothing could hold so much of a person.

I lived in that shirt for seven days. I slept in it, made calls in it, padded around my Brunswick apartment in it. When the Melbourne rain started on the fourth night, I didn't reach for a jumper. I just pulled the sleeves over my hands and let the cotton soak up the sound of the city.

There's a particular kind of madness that follows a serious relationship ending. You start to believe that if you let go of the small things—the shirts, the mugs, the toothbrushes—you'll lose the memory too. So you hold on. You wear the fabric like a bandage, as if the scent trapped in the fibres is the only thing keeping the whole story from dissolving into nothing.

That shirt became my uniform, my armour, my confession. I didn't tell anyone how long I'd been wearing it. I just kept buttoning it up each morning, even when the collar started to fray and the cuffs went grey. Writing about it now feels like finally folding it away for good.

The first morning after

He left on a Tuesday. I remember because Tuesday was always the day we did groceries at the South Melbourne market. I woke up to an empty bed and the smell of him still on the pillow. The shirt was draped over the back of the bedroom door, where he'd tossed it during the argument. I slipped it on before my feet hit the floorboards.

It was too big in the shoulders, which is probably why I loved it. His dad had bought it for him from a shop on Smith Street that no longer exists. I pulled the collar up to my nose and breathed in. It was still there—that warm scent that made my chest ache in a way I couldn't quite name.

The smell of memory

By the third day, the scent was fading too. I panicked. I considered not washing my hair, not opening the windows, not doing anything that might let the outside air in. I turned the heater up in the middle of a cold snap, even though my electricity bill was already climbing from the winter rates set by the Victorian Default Offer.

There's something almost animal about the way we cling to scent after a loss. Studies have shown that smell is the sense most closely tied to memory, which is probably why a worn-in cotton shirt can feel more like a person than a phone full of photos. I sprayed his cologne on the collar once, just to tide myself over. It felt ridiculous. It felt necessary. That's the contradiction of heartbreak.

Wearing it outside

On the fifth day, I had to post a parcel at the post office in Fitzroy. I forgot I was still wearing the shirt. I only realised when I caught my reflection in the chemist window—bare feet in thongs, unwashed hair piled on top of my head, and that oversized blue button-down hanging past my thighs.

The woman behind the counter didn't say anything. She just smiled at me the way Melbourne baristas smile at you when they can tell you've had a hard week. I walked home slower than usual, catching the tram along Brunswick Street and letting the afternoon sun warm the fabric against my skin. For a moment, I wasn't a woman in mourning. I was just someone in a soft shirt, walking through a city I loved.

The first wash

I finally washed it on the Sunday. I stood at the laundry tub in our building—technically my building now—and watched the water turn cloudy. I held the collar under the tap one last time, then put it in the machine with the rest of my clothes.

The spin cycle felt like a betrayal. The shirt was starting to smell less like him and more like the curry I'd reheated three nights in a row. I knew I had to do it.

I hung it on the line on the balcony, because the Australian sun is the only thing that can properly bleach a memory clean. When I brought it inside, it smelled like nothing. Like fabric. Like a shirt.

Letting the sleeves go

I folded it that night and put it in a box under the bed. I didn't throw it away. I couldn't. But I also couldn't wear it again, not now that it smelled like generic detergent and the lavender dryer sheets from Coles.

A friend helped me pack up the rest of his things. She asked if I wanted to keep the shirt. I said yes, but I wasn't sure why. Maybe I thought I'd need it again someday, for a different kind of cold.

What I learned, eventually, is that we don't keep these things because we're weak. We keep them because they're proof we loved someone. The shirt is still under my bed. I haven't looked at it in months.

Writing my way out

I started writing about the breakup three weeks later. I wrote about the mug, the chair, the unmade bed. I wrote about that week in the shirt, how it felt like wearing a piece of someone else's skin. The words came out messy and strange, but they came.

Writing has always been my way of metabolising things. I can sit with a sentence for an hour, circling the truth of it, until the truth settles into the page. That's what I did with the shirt. I wrote it down so I could finally put it down.

There's a piece I published earlier this year about a different relic from that same relationship. You can read about the necklace I kept on a chain for months after we ended. It tells a similar story from a different angle. The shirt and the necklace are cousins, in a way—both of them small, ordinary things that held more weight than they should have.

Finding my own collar

These days, I buy my own shirts. I learnt that the oversized button-downs I kept reaching for were never really about fashion. They were about closeness. About wanting to be wrapped in someone else's shape.

I still love a soft cotton. I still like the sleeves long enough to pull over my hands. But I buy them in my own measurements, in colours he never wore. Last month, I found a sage-green one at a sample sale in Collingwood. I wore it home and didn't think about him once.

If you're reading this and you're still in your own week of the shirt, I want you to know it ends. The scent fades. The fabric softens into something you can finally fold. You will wear your own clothes again, and they will fit in a way that has nothing to do with him and everything to do with you.

Submit your own story about the things you wore through heartbreak to my submissions page. Or reach out via the contact form if you need a reader, a sounding board, or just someone to tell you that the shirt in the photo you're too scared to wash is going to be okay. I'm here, I'm reading, and I'm wearing my own collar now.