A Thong to Remember
A coming of age story about when my almost-non-boyfriend gave me a pair of worn underwear that weren't mine ... and I took them
When he handed me the worn, lacy thong that sticky, Brooklyn morning – I was crouched half-naked next to his bed, fishing through my oversized purse for concealer.
It was summer 2015, approximately 8:26am, and down the street I could hear the M train screech to a stop at the Knickerbocker platform.
“Shit,” I’d muttered – fumbling over makeup brushes. I’d be late for work.
We had slept for the total equivalent of a nap the prior evening, having spent the dew hours on his apartment roof watching the sunrise, blankets tucked around our bodies and a cheap red wine bottle sloshing back and forth between us.
It felt like love – to watch the city wake up together. And New York has a tricky way of making you feel like every intimate interaction is a romance novel waiting to be told: every nightcap and sunrise – unique.
The bedroom window in his apartment was cracked, filtering the scent of our booze-induced night, and the breeze blew sheet music off his keyboard and onto the floor, scattering around us.
I was tired; painfully hungover. The type that sits behind your eyes, leaves your mouth dry, and nestles into your temples.
I felt it was worth it. But I also thought better than to say that to him.
“Why do we do this to ourselves,” I moaned instead, in a less-than-subtle attempt to see where he stood on the evening.
I envisioned him sweeping me off my feet: “Because we’re falling in love, you beautiful, unique and intriguing woman.”
Instead, I watched from the purview of his cheap floor length mirror as his lean body shuffled heavy-footed around the room, and flimsy grey comforter slipped off his shoulder and down his back.
“I don’t know,” he muttered, back turned as he stood towards his closet. “You don’t let me catch a break girl.”
My cheeks flushed.
A sex quip.
Not what I was exactly going for – but okay okay, we can work with it.
I watched as he dragged a battered laundry basket out of his closet and bent over, rummaging around it.
“I have something for you by the way,” he said, as I sat crouched like a Lord of the Rings hobbit. “You left these here last time.”
Turning to me, he held up a pair of beige, lacy – and clearly worn – underwear, dangling them at eye level.
Only one problem: they were definitely, 100%, without a doubt, not mine.
In retrospect, people say, with such certainty, that you can see situations coming like the one unfolding to me here – when someone doesn’t want you the way you want them and that they make it obvious.
But the truth is when you’re young you don’t see for yourself yet; it’s just that everyone is busy seeing for you – and you ignore them.
I had met “W,” I’ll call him, through mutual friends on a camping trip in upstate New York. He was tall, with long, confident blonde hair – and when he smiled, you noticed. When he spoke, you looked.
The first time I saw him, he was slack-lining in the forest.
Because, of course he was.
Pictures of that moment remain fossilized on my Facebook timeline: me observing him in the background, my oversized hoodie tucked around my waist as he balanced.
In the photo, I look as awestruck as I felt. It is an objectively laughable image if it wasn’t so pathetic.
Early on in the weekend, he mentioned that his father founded Earth Day in the late ’60s.
Earth Day, I made sure to tell him, was also my birthday.
What I really wanted to say was: Soulmates.
From the start, he had a sort of quiet detachment. It wasn’t so much the textbook aloofness you'd read about in Psychology Today, but in a way that you understood this person was constantly sifting through their thoughts, carefully deciding which ones were worth revealing.
Oooohhh mysterious.
He was calm in large groups, speaking often only when spoken to. Smiling politely in unison. Often, when he asked you questions, you’d realize he had listened to every word you said and was not actually just quiet out of perceived disinterest.
A rarity in New York.
When most people spoke to him, they used their words carefully. On the contrary, when I spoke to him I overshared in a vain attempt to appear more interesting.
As you age, you recognize that on some unconscious level not only did you probably contribute to certain outcomes happening in your past, but you also likely orchestrated them in your own blind, stumbling innocence.
This is one of those.
I was 25, insecure, new to recovery from an eating disorder, and when he kissed me hard the first time on a camping tarp in the woods – rocked by idealization.
He was 24, on tour with a well known comedian, arrogant enough to know how to be aloof, and mostly emotionally unavailable and mostly noncommittal, which is far worse than definitively noncommittal and definitively unavailable.
Occasionally, as the months passed and late at night with our legs intertwined under unkempt sheets, he’d share details about his difficult childhood, or confess an intimate secret like how he chewed his toenails off with his teeth.
Oftentimes, after a few whiskeys, he’d kiss me on the temple in public.
I even met a few of his friends. Albeit, on accident.
Sometimes, he checked in a few times a week. Mostly, at night – but not too late, just barely. Some weeks, he only texted once.
Those weeks were agony.
Right before this situation with the underwear we had ended things (re: he had ended things by simply not texting for three weeks) and I had simply done — nothing. Yet, when we saw each other at a friend’s family beach house the weekend prior, we made out drunkenly, sloppily, on the balcony.
And so it goes.
When I told friends about it afterwards, I conveniently omitted the amount of alcohol consumed. Instead, I made sure to tell how he tracked me down on the beach, grabbing at my shirt to talk about things. I left out the slurred words, and conveniently left in the description of the way his hand grazed my back, possessively, as I purposely flirted with another in front of him like the toxic hurricane I loved to be.
He hadn’t called again for a week after the beach. And when he did finally shoot a text, I told friends this time I’d end it.
Only I didn’t. Instead, we were here again, hooking up at sunrise with grape-stained teeth clinking together on the same Brooklyn rooftop.
And I was now very, very late for work.
So when he handed me someone else’s beige, lacy – and dirty – underwear from the laundry that morning it shouldn’t have come as a complete shock.
But, to quote Stephanie Danler in her coming of age NYC memoir “Sweetbitter:
“When you can’t see in front of you, life is nothing but surprises. Looking back, there are truly so few of them.”
Handing them to me with the tips of his fingers, he dropped the pair onto my crouched body.
I froze, peering down, still gripping my concealer bottle between two fingers.
Dangling from my right kneecap, the thong hung haphazardly, lace ripped near the crotch, elastic stretched.
I knew instantly that I did not recognize the underwear.
“I’m gonna make some coffee,” he said, turning away from the horror unfolding on my leg.
But surely, SURELY, I reckoned, I must be mistaken. Hadn’t we just made effortless love all night??? Watched the sunrise with real wine glasses??? Listened to Morrisey and Taj Mahal on record??
Had I perhaps made a pit stop at Victoria Secret I’d now forgotten about? Had I grown in my hips? Was this his idea of a gift?
I poked the thong with my fingers, pulling them up briefly from my knee to examine.
My stomach sinking as I concluded: they were in fact absolutely not mine.
I took them anyway.
A sponge for incident at 25, I took a random woman’s dirty underwear. And I didn’t say a word.
Not only did I take them, I shoved those babies to the bottom of my oversized purse, screwed on the cap of my concealer, stood up and kissed him gingerly goodbye, and proceeded to waltz out with them from the streets of Ridgewood, Brooklyn to the M train headed city-bound, and all the way to my office on East 57th.
For 48 long minutes, that pair of lacy, dirty, beige underwear traveled alongside me as I sat grief-stricken on the subway.
As I carted the now bunched up undergarment all the way to my 4th floor office, I promptly hissed at my then unassuming ‘work’ husband sitting innocently at his desk, and dragged him into my office to show the evidence.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said, peering over and into my bag, his sympathy lackluster as he tried not to visibly laugh at my distress.
Over the years, I've shared this story countless times, often over a bottle of wine. And it almost always ends with the same rhetorical question my co-worker also asked that day:
Why would you take someone else’s underwear?
All I can really say is this:
When you are crouched half-naked, running late, insecure, and sleeping with someone who is treating you like you are disposable: you will probably make choices you otherwise wouldn’t.
In that moment, when he handed me the underwear, I didn’t want to accept what was happening. Besides, who sleeps around and then confidently hands random intimates out with such certainty?
“What?” – my first thought.
“Oh GOD.” – my second thought.
“Don’t make it awkward.” – my third thought.
Like any good southern woman, I was brought up to diffuse situations, stay small, and take up as little emotional space as possible.
A flicker of heightened emotion often regarded as dramatic or unnecessary.
I didn’t want to cause a scene. I especially didn’t want to lose this — this obviously BEAUTIFUL love affair that was unfolding in his dusty, run-down Brooklyn apartment.
So, instead, I orchestrated a life where I was now taking someone else’s used underwear to work in an attempt to play it cool.
Cool.
For a long time following this incident, I consoled myself with the idea that it wouldn’t have mattered, seeing the reality or not seeing it. I was, like I said, a sponge for incident at that time in my life. And maybe everyone is when they’re young.
Days filled with unsolicited advice you defiantly don’t take and subtle warnings you don’t want to hear: the whitewashing of all your excitement.
Yes, I definitely saw all of this coming, exactly the way it came. Yet, when finally faced with reality, it still took me by total surprise, as if expecting it made no difference at all.
Later that afternoon, after enduring relentless berating from co-workers who had caught wind of the delectable, I did end up telling W about his social faux pas.
(And yes, I did also rid myself of the garment.)
He immediately apologized. Profusely. Because of course he did.
“It’s a friend’s,” he claimed. And I didn’t ask questions.
Because what was there to even say?
We went on a date as repentance. A proper one after that.
Once.
And I continued to pine for a few more weeks: somehow still shocked at his continued non-commitment.
At some point that year, it ended with lackluster – like all things do when it comes to situations like this. There’s an expiration date dancing above the horizon, and though it’s glaring at you in the face you do everything you can to avoid looking directly at it.
It’s only through the sunglass protection of time that it’s easier to gaze.
He left New York not long after. A few months later, I left too. Funny enough, we both moved to Colorado and had a drink once. Of which, I’m sure I still had a bit of pining secretly left in me.
But we never bumped into each other following it. And he never reached out again.
I used to roll my eyes at the mention of his name, in that “don’t-care-but-kinda-care-and-still-hurt” way. But, what I really felt was hurt by my own actions: a brooding shame for not asserting myself better in that situation.
Overtime, I concluded that this man is not a malicious man. At least he wasn’t to me. He just didn’t want me the way I wanted him. And I never asked otherwise.
Oh, and he stupidly gave me someone’s underwear.
There have been worse dating crimes.
Albeit, probably not many as careless.
A decade later, what I remember of my time with this person was that he cared to the capacity that he cared. He asked questions about my life and he was present when he was with me, and offered perspectives that I value today.
Every romantic situation offers you something, if you want to absorb it. And accept your role within its creation, outcome and dissolution.
The harsh truth I took from it all is that you cannot flirt, fuck or fictionalize yourself into a vision that is simply not reality.
And that was on me – to demand better.
It was on me – to look up from the story I created and compare it with the truth.
It was on me – to want better.
And eventually, I did demand better, or maybe I just got older and less tolerant of bullshit. The jury’s still out.
Though I still smile when I think of this story, or anytime I peruse a Victoria Secret store and my eyes fall over a beige, lacy thong.
I think of that one woman out there, who’s underwear I became so closely attached to one morning in 2015 —
To her I say: may your life be adorned with plenty of other lovely beige thongs. May you use your voice, if you feel you need to. May you find the right kind of love for your heart.
And to you, Brooklyn boy, I wish you a happy life as well. Thanks for the sunrises. You gave me a good laugh over the years.
You are so honest Linds— we all look back over regrets. You bring us to ask “ why”. So thankful you are now demanding more of yourself and teaching the rest of us to do the same.
"Like any good southern woman, I was brought up to diffuse situations, stay small, and take up as little emotional space as possible." Soooo relatable!