any years ago I lost a perfect shirt. The shirt was a soft orangey red and had been my mother’s. I started wearing it when I was about 12 and wore it well into my twenties, at which point it was over 50 years old. How can I explain this shirt? It was the colour of a lipstick advertised in a 1970s and was made of a thin, thin cotton that kept growing thinner, as if preparing me for the loss. It had three quarter sleeves that you could roll up and button back, until the buttons fell off and I couldn’t find the right shade of replacements. On its
