Me & My Old Blue Jeans

It's hard letting go even when the spark of joy has long since passed.

Source: Tumblr, photographer & model unknown

Why do we hold onto those who may not have our best interests in mind? Those people might be remote coastal elites, parasocially influencing us through our very human fear of missing out, or they may be people less remote, more local, elite only in our own conception. Perhaps the fit between you two never was that great, but they remained the closest to ideal; perhaps it is their ideal itself which motivates you to waste away, molding yourself to fit into it, like a pair of vintage jeans you keep on the chance may someday fit into it again. Hope begins to wanes at some point, however, and the jeans might end up on a pile for donation. The jeans may never bring you the joy it once did but it might for someone else, someone who need not waste away, suck their stomach in nor jump up and down just to fit into the stiff pair of jeans you have since outgrown. Perhaps, if not for you, the jeans would fit someone else perfectly.

For the longest time, my waist has stood at 29 inches. Earlier in my workout journey, I could even fit into 27 inches. Those days are long past and the jeans, long gone. My waist has ballooned even further this summer, courtesy of eating well and working out semi-regularly—“happy weight,” my girlfriend calls it. Even my skin cannot keep up, faded silver and fresh red stripes near the top of my arms attesting to my progress. My bust has grown and my shirts now hug my chest even more tightly. Shirts are one thing, for shirts can so easily be bought, but jeans are another matter entirely. 

Well-fitting jeans accumulate over time, molded by wear and kept for years on end. I can still remember struggling to find a pair at our local Bealls, insisting on Levi’s simply because I saw my junior high classmates in Fort Towson wearing them. I would not find what I sought there, it turns out, but at a thrift store, rather, where I would find the first pair of jeans I loved: Levi’s 517 boot cut jeans in a dark wash. Though I owned but one pair of boots, not workwear nor cowboy boots but Doc Martens Chelseas, no less, these jeans fit around my waist perfectly, hugged my thighs tightly and lifted my ass in a way no pair of jeans ever had before nor has ever since. With calves that pale in proportion to my thighs, the flared bottoms on the boot cut flattered my figure and made me look more proportionate.

And so I cherished this pair of jeans for years on end, from undergrad to beyond, from my first apartment in the city to my first home just outside it. It was not until last summer that this pair of jeans began to appear less and less in my repertoire, replaced by yet another thrift find.

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I never thought very highly of Wranglers. The brand just did not have the cultural cachet of Levi’s, and had not made its way, by way of reference, into Radio Disney airwaves. (Lyrics like “Your hair, your eyes, your old Levi’s, when we kiss I’m hypnotized,” contributed to the Levi’s mythos.) I could get Wranglers from Walmart, whereas Levi’s remained exclusive to department stores, transcending its workwear roots and making its way into every suburban teen’s closet. This made Levi’s seem much more cosmopolitan from my small-town point of view. Later, Target would end up carrying Levi’s, but this did not make much of a difference to me. Our small town only had a Walmart. My stepfather, a truck driver, wore Wranglers and I did not think him very fashionable. 

I suppose this had very much to do with wanting to become someone else, to transcend the class I felt unfairly lumped into. But sometime last year, I received a text from a long-time friend about some vintage Wranglers she had come across, two pairs in two different washes, one light and one dark. The next time I saw Her, she gifted me these and though the lighter pair did not fit, the dark pair quickly became a staple in my wardrobe. Thick denim with little stretch to the fabric, with a higher waist than any of my other pairs of pants, these jeans could withstand manual labor. Amidst a trend of workwear, Carhartt pants and loose-fitting clothes, my new old jeans got a lot of wear.

The aforementioned vintage Wranglers (IG: @ttlrake)

That was a year ago. Due to the “happy weight” discussed previously, I can no longer fit right into those jeans so comfortably anymore. Just the same, I no longer talk to the friend who bought me those jeans. Eight years of friendship simply fizzled out, ending not with a bang but with a shady reply to my Instagram story and my removal from Her finsta. I lamented for some time and, to this day, every once in a while. “What did I do?” I would ponder. “How can we fix this?” I wondered for a while, until I realized We did not exist anymore, if it ever truly did. The question thus became “How can I fix this?”