Coming out of the closet…

I opened my wardrobe door today. Well, I do most days, searching for something to throw on to hide my body. These days I try to avoid looking to the left, that’s where my army of suits hang like waiting soldiers, reminders of busier times, memories of days spent driving to meetings and flying away on business on planes. Suits and ties and dress shirts that I don’t really need now, but to throw them away would be like admitting defeat.

Oh, I know I am defeated, and I can’t really imagine a situation where I’m likely to need a suit and tie - a funeral maybe? Mine?

Sometimes I think I’ll slip into a suit just for the fun of it and stroll into town looking busy as if I have somewhere important to go. Maybe, sit in a coffee house and pretend to read important e-mails, even make urgent phone calls to my voicemail…

“You have no new messages and saved messages.”
“I see, well how about Tuesday then? I can probably do Tuesday. I’ll ask my PA to book a flight.”

Not that I ever had a PA.

Thing is I know that most of my suits won’t fit and my shirt collars will be too tight. Even my ties look a little last year, but only because they are two years old at least. And all of my fifteen blue shirts are beginning to look a little shabby, the blue oxford collars wrinkled - I wear them all the time with jeans you see, they make me feel secure… almost.

And at the back of the wardrobe is a place called Banarnia. If I push really hard through my forest of suits I can still go there in my mind. I used to go there all the time, every day really and in reality; putting on one of my suits and tying my tie and trying hard not to turn into a monkey. I’d step through the wardrobe door and out on the other side to the place where the monkeys would leave banana skins for me to slip on. I was really careful not to slip. If I fell over in Banarnia I might never get up again. But I slipped one day and the Monkeys pounced, and that, as they say, was that. The Scum and Deadhead fell on me and I was done for.

No worries. I’ll shut my wardrobe door and leave my suits for another day. Who knows? One day I might even be able to open it and throw them all away.