It was a good run.  

We had a lot of years, more than most.  But now, and I say this with no misgivings, it’s over.  We had some tough spots; we had a few laughs.  Remember the morning after that glorious wedding when we tried to figure out how red wine spilled all over the inside of my dress, but not the outside?  Or during Covid, how you kindly overlooked the tightness of my clothes, averting your eyes from the sweatpants shrink-wrapping my thighs.  And what about the red puddles of ink on my brand-new duvet cover?  I know you thought they were blood stains and suspected homicide, and yet, no judgement. Monica Lewinsky, if only your blue dress had known such grace.  Those are the times I’ll hold on to.  Not the times you treated me callously.  Not when you were irresponsible with my trust.  You lost something precious to me, and in doing so revealed a painful truth: We are not friends.  Friends aren’t careless with one another, or their belongings.  Ours is nothing but a terribly dysfunctional relationship.  And so today I say goodbye.  Goodbye, my dry cleaner.  I can’t fucking believe you lost my leather pants.

As such, I will be returning my polyester bag with my misspelled last name and a whole bunch of hangers that you say you recycle but really, who knows?  I can’t quite talk about the leather pants you said you returned but definitely did not, except to say that I will mourn them forever.  So give me back what I have left and let’s just move on like adults.  I expect all my shirts returned without a fuss.  And don’t tell me I just dropped the shirts off this week because I KNOW I dropped them off last week.  I can scarcely remember what I had for breakfast today, but I know when I dropped the shirts off.  I know it in my bones.  Which is to say that I am pretty sure.  Sort of sure.  But that’s off topic.  I believed in you and your magic cleaning process and that giant sign in your window that said you were “LEATHER & SUEDE EXPERTS.”  I mean surely you must have passed a special multi-week leather and suede certification class in Milan to have such a large sign in your window extolling that particular expertise, right?  I mean, it’s not like those signs are just given out willy-nilly.  The sign said you were an EXPERT.  But you know what the first rule of being a LEATHER & SUEDE EXPERT is?  Not to lose anything LEATHER or SUEDE.  

This is our end.  I won’t miss your tiny dressing room where my body touches both walls as I struggle to pull on another pair of too-tight pants.  Oh, and that pair of heels you keep in the dressing room? Answer the phone. It’s Ethel Mertz calling and she wants them back.  No longer will I struggle to wonder why when I point out a specific stain on my garment, you apply red tape everywhere except near where the stain is.  What is up with that? And something else I’ve been holding on to for years …the concept of LIGHT starch. Lord knows I tried to make my feelings known but admittedly, I gave up.  Worse, I suppressed my own starch desires in favor of yours.  Your interpretation of my starch needs superseded my own starch wants, and that was wrong.  Once I dropped a starched shirt on the floor and it shattered like a broken mirror.  No more. Today, I take back my power.  There will be no more speaking to me like a child who doesn’t understand the complexities of dry cleaning…though truth be told I am utterly fascinated as to how my clothes are getting cleaned if they’re not actually getting wet.  But alas, the time for that explanation has come and gone and today as I leave, I am just a girl, standing in front of her cleaner, asking him to please, for the love of God, find my leather pants.

I especially won’t miss your gaslighting.  How you insisted the leather pants were delivered…the hubris!  Or the time I listened politely as you explained how the new stain was the old stain, even when the old stain was still there.  I knew I was being had, but given the enormity of the stain tape parameters, what could I say?   So, I said nothing.  And in my silence who knows how many more stains you lobbed onto other unsuspecting clothing.  I may be down a pair of leather pants, but with loss comes wisdom.  I see things a whole lot clearer now.  I’m unafraid to say that I don’t think you even washed my jeans, how about that?  In fact, I’d go as far as theorizing that you ranked at the very bottom of your special LEATHER & SUEDE EXPERT class in Milan.  This is New York City, my friend.  The big leagues.  You lose a pair of leather pants and just like THAT, I walk three doors down to another dry cleaner and you fade from my memory the way I wish that red ink had faded from the duvet.  And my new dry cleaner is an actual “LEATHER & SUEDE EXPERT!”  How do I know?  Well, their sign says so… duh!

It may have taken me too long to have the bravery to leave you – that, and because you still had a shit-ton of my clothes – but I am walking out the door a new woman. Never again will I be taken to the cleaners.  [Except that new dry cleaner three doors down I mentioned.]  I enter 2022 a bit wiser, not necessarily any nicer, thinner, more organized, or more forgiving, but with the fortitude to abandon what no longer serves me.  Good-bye leather pants.  I won’t forget you.  And on the off-off chance that I find you crammed in the back of my closet, still on the hanger and wrapped in the plastic with the name of the establishment I so thoroughly eviscerated, please know that I will walk back in as if nothing ever happened, hoping we can both agree that the whole thing was just a terrible misunderstanding.  More starch, you say?  Why, yes! More starch sounds just right.