I can’t pay $55 for a t-shirt. I just can’t. I don’t understand why a t-shirt costs $55. I remember t-shirts costing $20 or less. I don’t know what happened, what cruel joke is being inflicted on my bank account. Are time and inflation organic soul mates caught in a cosmic relationship of hopeless devotion that the world must suffer? Has inflation gaslighted time into believing that time would cease to exist without it? Or is their paring a social construct, forced onto the masses like political correctness? Did time see inflation and fall deeply in love, and now they frolic together, hand in hand, all over my hopes and dreams? Or were the two locked into a room, forced to procreate, like a Poodle and a Labrador, and the result was this goddamned $55 t-shirt? 

I like your look, $55 t-shirt, like you come from the 1990s, worn. But I know your origin story. I know you never endured MMMBop, the Clinton years, third-wave feminism, or Friends. I know no one sweated on you at Lalapalooza in 1991 or pissed on you at Woodstock ’94. Nor did you witness the Chicago Bulls 72-10 season or either of their 3-peats. I know Char Johnston didn’t steal you from my gym bag, take you home and cry on you in the dark while Mazzy Star’s Fade into You played repetitiously in the background. You’ve never reeked of spilled Zima, cheap Patchouli, or a shitty Cuban Vanilla scented Pier One candle. You can’t trick me $55 t-shirt; I know you were born in the 2020s.

What upsets me most about you, $55 t-shirt, is how you reflect the sad reality that I can’t afford you. I hate wanting you. I hate not being able to afford you more. I hate knowing you exist and that you are doing your thing without me. I’m sitting here, in my free t-shirt, desiring you, writing these stupid words, and you’re not even thinking about me, are you? Sad. The whole situation is just sad. Or maybe I’m sad. Maybe I want to go back, try again, do something different. Say no, or yes, or fuck it. And I can’t. So, I place my hopes in grad school. I pray to some god, who I still catch myself imagining to be male, that something will click, that a light in this oversized cranium of mine will turn on, and I’ll know exactly what to do with my life, with myself. I pray for a mysterious Magwitch, like Pip’s, to bankroll my dreams from the shadows. Maybe, then I could buy you, $55 t-shirt. Maybe then I’d give myself permission to do what I want to do.