After the Waves: The Cute Skirt
When sparking joy sparks memory.
There is something to be said about getting rid of old stuff. Marie Kondo really knew what she was doing when she shared her “tidying” philosophy with the world and set everyone off on their path to spark joy. One spring weekend a few years back, I decided to seek out some joy sparks of my own and tackle the slightly dreaded, inevitable nostalgia-inducing, should I or shouldn’t I-debating, will I wear it again-vacillating, but ultimately satisfying task of spring cleaning.
Now, we all know the old adage, sometimes it has to get worse before it gets better, and that is precisely how the weekend went. Now, because this seasonal activity was happening a bit before Marie’s book came out, I didn’t know how to Kondo. Instead of methodically, calmly and reverentially spending time with each item to see if it sparked joy and then thanking it before it was sent on its way if it didn’t, I had managed to rip the whole house apart all at once. Room by room. Closet by closet. Piles of clothes, shoes, coats, bags, towels, you name it. I was bringing on the worse to get to the better. Sparked joy be damned!
“Tidying is the act of confronting yourself.”
— Marie Kondo
In a house with two bedrooms, there were six closets. It probably would have made sense to attack each room separately, but there is something satisfying about not only focusing all of your energy on ferociously and viciously deciding to get rid of stuff, but to count the fruits of your labor in the number of piles you create. It was as if I had donned “just get rid of it” glasses and I didn’t know how long I could keep them on so I just kept going. Finished with one bedroom, head to the other one. Finished with the bedrooms, head to the bathroom. You get the picture.
I had tapped into an unforgiving and laser-like decision-making progress that I knew wasn’t going to last. Even stopping to bag up everything might de-energize me so I just kept going. The growing piles and the emptied racks and shelves fed my determination. I had finally found my superpower! I’ll call it Clannihilation! Otherwise known as good old clutter annihilation. Call it whatever you want, I was getting good at it. The other thing that kept me going was that I knew that sooner or later I would come across some item that would hit me hard in the feels and stop me in my tracks. It would derail me from my purge-tastic mission of destruction. Call it T-Shirt Kryptonite.
My house is old and has gone through a couple of iterations, or so the town’s historical society told me. From what I can gather, it has been a boardinghouse, an optician’s home-slash-office and even a general store. It has some very charming aspects to that I love, but being so old, it also has its share of quirky features. And by quirky, I mean annoying. Like the closet in my bedroom. It is very long but not deep, runs behind a wall and was built over a back staircase. I have to stand inside of it and move hanging clothing to the side in order to reach all the way into the back. So, so quirky.
So there I stood, inside my quirky closet, ripping through racks and shelves. Relentlessly throwing stuff in piles on the bedroom floor. Doesn’t fit, gone. Haven’t worn it, gone. Still has tags on it, gone. Used to be a favorite but wouldn’t be caught dead in it now, bye-bye.
I stormed through my cotton-constructed enemies through to the back corner and unhooked a hanger with a cute skirt hanging from it. Enter: Kryptonite.
This particular cute skirt happened to be the cute skirt I was wearing on that fateful day back in 2004. The cute skirt that was the bottom half of the cute outfit I was wearing as we were getting ready to catch a ride to another part of the island.
The cute skirt that was one of four articles of clothing I was left with after escaping the hotel roof. Well, six if you count the flip-flops.
The cute skirt that I had, among other things, climbed over a fence and a concrete wall in order to reach dryer ground and what I hoped would be safety in.
The cute skirt that was still pinned to the hanger on which the Bangkok hotel laundry service had returned it a few days after we had made our way back to the mainland. I must have packed it that way, along with the red tank top I was wearing which was hung on its own laundry hanger.
“By acknowledging their contribution and letting them go with gratitude, you will be able to truly put the things you own, and your life, in order.” — Marie Kondo
Seeing the skirt reminded me of all of the things that happened when we got back to Bangkok. Reminded me of how people only a few hundred miles away had such a different perspective of what had happened. Reminded me of how people laughed at us when we told them what we had been through.
Our planned itinerary didn’t have us returning to Bangkok for another week, so when we made our unplanned return early, we didn’t have a clear sense of where we were going to stay when we got back.
~ ~ ~ Hold on for a sec. I know that I am skipping a step here by talking about escaping Phuket and being back in Bangkok but not HOW we got off Phuket and were able to fly back to Bangkok. I will get to it. I promise. ~ ~ ~
Being that this all happened during the holiday season made it particularly tricky to make a hotel reservation – and the last thing we needed at that moment was for something to be extra tricky at that point. But thanks to Usheen, her tenacity and her international connections, we were able to secure a room back on the mainland at the JW Marriott in downtown Bangkok. The irony was that we were actually headed to the Phuket JW Marriott when shit went down, so I guess someone, somewhere wanted us to stay in a JW.
We arrived at the hotel still in a state of shock, with no luggage, in the same clothes that we had been in for two harrowing days, clutching our handbags (one of the many miraculous parts of this story) and looking pretty damn traumatized and grimy.
The hotel desk clerks looked at us like we had three heads.
“We were in the tsunami,” we told them. “We just came in from Phuket.”
They smiled politely and asked us where our luggage was.
“We lost all of it,” we told them.
They continued to smile politely and then moved a few feet away from us to whisper to each other, punch keys of their computers, glance at their monitors, and look at us sideways.
This was not a rinky-dink hotel. Ush has very good connections. But they were laughing at us. Maybe not out loud, with absolutely with their eyes and their skepticism.
It became obvious pretty quickly that they were humoring us. Humoring the grimy and wild-eyed Americans who had a real reservation but no luggage and who had come into their hotel telling tall tales of terror and destruction.
There was one woman though. She had been helping another guest check in, but she must have been listening to our exchange. Either she took pity on us, wanted to help us, or just plain believed us because once she was done with her guest, she walked us to our room and told us where we could go to buy clothes and such rudimentary things like a toothbrush and toothpaste. She also offered to send our clothes to the hotel laundry for us when we got back with new ones. At no charge. She said that although it was not much, it was something that she could do for us.
Now, what I must say here is that we were not looking for handouts. Not looking for a free ride because of what we had been through. We knew that we were extraordinarily lucky with the way things unfolded, especially for the kindness that we were shown by Dean and Deborah (another skipped-for-the-moment step in the story, but an important one). But it was completely unnerving to us how unaffected people seemed to be at what had happened.
People. Laughed. At. Us. Maybe not directly in our faces, but pretty damn close.
Maybe because it had just happened the full impact hadn’t sunk in yet. I don’t know. Even though this was before the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and social media, we knew someone was reporting what had happened. We had watched them update the casualty count on the BBC for hours as we huddled together at the Montana Grand Hotel. As unnerving as this hotel’s reaction was, what was even more unnerving was that theirs was neither the first, nor the most upsetting of more reactions to come.
It didn’t take much to get settled into our room because we didn’t have much with us. The store that the nice woman had mentioned really was close by. It was what we might call here a department store, and maybe a five-minute walk from the hotel.
Now, while I remember so much of this experience, there are some things that have blurred. For example, I am not 100% clear whether we went right out to the store or we slept or showered. I can’t imagine that we would either sleep in our gross clothes, or shower and then put our gross clothes back on. Knowing myself and Ush the way I do, I am guessing we tried to clean up as much as possible and headed back out. Not to shop per se, but just to get the bare essentials and maybe some snacks for the room.
Without a doubt, we were most likely still in shock. We hadn’t slept or eaten and we had just gotten laughed at a very low and vulnerable time. We knew that although we were now safe, we were for the most part still on our own to figure things out. We were determined to keep pushing through to try and restore some normalcy and figure out what we were going to do next.
Even now when the topic of the tsunami occasionally comes up, we wonder how we had gotten through it when so many others hadn’t. We wondered if our years working in New York had sharpened our street smarts. Maybe. We wondered if our experience working in New York during 9/11 had given us some sort of edge. Again, maybe.
Although seemingly meaningless, and taking into account the big picture, that one woman offering to help us like that is one of the things that has stayed with me all these years later.
The nice woman offered to have our clothes cleaned for us.
I have since moved on from my quirky old house. When I moved in 2017 I had an opportunity to supercharge my superpower and really purge. I’m sure it wasn’t the first time since that weekend I stood inside that closet looking for things to discard, but moving presented an opportunity to purge on an even bigger scale. Things like furniture, old linens and pillows, mismatched dishes and glasses, and all that kitchen stuff that looks cool but never gets used.
But when it came time to pack up to pack my clothes, there it was. Still hanging in the closet. Still on the same hanger. Held by the same safety pins. Tucked away in the back.
Now the cute skirt lives in my new closet. Tucked away in the back where it has gotten comfortable alongside the red tank top. I gave it a new hanger but left the pins. Now it just lives there, quietly, knowing that it will probably never be worn again, but will also never be a victim of a future purge.
“We should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of.”
— Marie Kondo
Every time I look at the cute skirt I think of the nice woman at the hotel who helped us. I have often wondered why she did what she did. Had she heard the news about the waves? Had she seen the footage that had been starting to hit the airwaves? Did she maybe know someone who was also there when it happened? Did she not like the way her colleagues treated us when we checked in? Was she just a nice person who saw two people in crisis?
I’ll never know why she did what she did, but when I see that skirt, I will always think of her and her small, yet meaningful gesture that may have more meaning to me now than it did then.
The cute skirt now has a way of sparking joy, but not through it the phrase’s intended meaning, and it will always be staying in the keep pile.
This post was written and posted on my old Wordpress site on April 19, 2009, and lightly edited before posting here on Substack.
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