I own a lot of clothes and wear about five of them.
I'm not going to turn this into an argument for owning less. Plenty of people have made that argument, usually while selling you the eight perfect items you should own instead, and the sermon has started to sound like the thing it claims to be against. I just want to count what I actually reach for, honestly, on a normal week.
There's a pair of straight-leg jeans gone thin at the left knee, not yet through, in the stage where I'm watching to see who gives out first.
The chambray shirt I've mentioned before and will mention again.
A navy-and-cream striped long-sleeve, the most ordinary thing I own, which is exactly why I wear it constantly.
Brown loafers worn to the shape of my actual feet, so that the idea of new shoes feels like a small betrayal.
And the cardigan. Oatmeal, secondhand, somebody else's before it was mine. The left elbow went last winter and I darned it in grey wool a shade too dark to match, on purpose, because a mend that pretends to be invisible always ends up looking worse than one that admits what it is. So now there's a small dark patch on the elbow that I see first whenever I put it on, and I've grown fond of it the way you grow fond of a scar with a story you can still remember.
Then there's the drawer. The silk blouse that needs an occasion I don't have. The heeled boots I bought for a version of my evenings that never arrived. Nice things, properly nice, that I keep meaning to wear and don't, because reaching for them would mean being a slightly different person than the one who keeps reaching for the cardigan.
I don't know what to do about the drawer. I'm not ready to give it away. I think I'm keeping the option of her, the blouse woman, in case she turns up after all.