Pre-loved

She walked through the door. The shop was musty, pungent with smell of time.

She breathed it in, taking her away from the crisp brittle autumn brightness. The unmade sense of the world, the time that hadn’t been lived yet.

She walked without direction, touching fabric, caressing folds of denim and silk. She loved this place, pre-loved. She always bought her clothes here, for their smell, their life.

This was a place that echoed with peoples’ lives. Pre-loved. She loved to wrap herself up in these fabrics, they were the castoff skins of the world, when people had grown into something new.

Their old skins, castoff colours of the lives they had lead, came here. Skins telling a story, with a soul, a way to wrap herself up in the life of another, to view the world with unfamiliar eyes. New clothes unnerved her, their crisp sharp lines and unlived past. She hated clothes that gave her nothing to read, the never loved.