I am the closet

I decided to go and buy a new pair of jeans today. I'm sure my supervisor would appreciate it if I would wear slacks, or maybe a skirt. But I just can't escape from my love of jeans.
My lack of fashion sense isn't really the point of today's story though. Or maybe it is.
I've walked around the large department store, looking for the jeans display that has the most reasonable price and pants that won't show any butt cleavage when I bend over. (No one needs to know what my favorite pair of undies actually say.) I've been in and out of the dressing room a few times trying to be sure I've got a good fit, not too long, not too tight around the ample belly. I'm going in for the last time and apparently so is everyone else who was in the store. I'm waiting in line, coat over one arm, blue fleece on to keep me warm, wearing jeans that are a less than perfect fit because they are my Sunday beat to shit jeans (Worn when I could care less that they were never made with a women's hips in mind.), holding two pairs of jeans to try on under my arm, shopping bag from EMS plus purse on the other. The next open stall will be mine, waiting.
Then, the perky sales associate walks in to collect the clothes that people have decided not to buy. I'm kind of around the corner from the clothes bar, there is a half wall between me and her.

She does a double take around the wall and giggles.

"Oh, you looked like a rack of clothes!"

I'm not offended, but can't help saying "I had no idea my appearance was so disheveled."

Or something like that.

Maybe it's because it's winter in New England and the wind is blowing entirely too hard outside to want to make it from the car to the mall entrance without the coat, hat and gloves. Maybe Sundays just aren't my day. (I have the awful habit of skipping any thorough cleaning regimen. Oh there are brushed teeth and my hair is brushed, but without extreme mousse my cowlick does what it damn well wants to.)

A rack of clothes. I must have been slouching. Or had that "soul sucked out of me/been in the mall longer than any human should" look. (Though, in my defense I'd been there less than half an hour.)

Perhaps I should just start to strive for the invisible factor. Y'know. Where you enter a place and try to settle in with the molecular composition of the bench or wall so you can just sit back and observe. You become so much a part of the static objects around you that people don't even notice you're there. That actually happened in my office the other day. I was shuffling papers in my printer, trying to organize, when a student walks through my open door and just stands there, rolling some pieces of candy wrapper in his hand, looking around on the floor, at the walls, any where except at the person who is standing in the middle of the room, arms half raised, papers suspended in hands not quite straightened yet.

That moment stretched. I decided I would see how long I could wait before he made another move or maybe said something. But he just stood there, lost somehow. Maybe the Andy Warhol rug that I've tried to spruce the floor up with hypnotized him. (It looks as if someone dropped a handful of giant sized wooden matches with multicolored striking tips on the rug. It's really a lot of fun.) I don't know how long we stood there. Me watching him, waiting for some kind of acknowledgement. Him, lost where ever his brain was, rolling those candy wrappers between his fingers. Making that crisp sound of cellophane, better than snapping bubble wrap.
I finally couldn't take it anymore.

"Hi. Could I help you with something?"

"Yeah, trash can." Still rolling the wrappers.

"Here, let me take care of that for you." I put out my hand to take the wrappers and throw them away. My trash can is on the far side of my desk and I didn't want him any further in my office lest he get lost in the spider plant which owns the back corner of my office.

He just handed them to me and left. It was truly strange. A moment where nothing else was happening except for the rolling candy wrappers. I don't know if I was invisible or if he was on his own plain of existence.

I'm a rack of clothes. He's a rolling candy wrapper. We're a simple moment when nothing else is as important as existing. When the mundane becomes god-like.

I'm a rack of clothes.

(Insert appropriate Emily Dickinson poem here.)