MY WARDROBE IS overflowing. With no Spring Cleaning habit for tropical people like me, my short-sleeved and long-sleeved shirts hang next to each other, expanding year by year. My trousers are much too few in number, and have been relegated to the lower section. My short pants are now in the drawers, folded next to my dozens of T-shirts.

My socks and underpants share a shelf, some always favoured; some not. They share the same fate as the bottles of spices in the kitchen.

Meanwhile, my shoes, though not many, have been moved to the backroom to rid my apartment entrance of the unwelcoming sight they collectively make.

My books overflow as well. E-books never caught on as a reading habit.

With age, my cabinet of pills also fills up. The simple alphabet vitamins are pushed to the back by other more sophisticated ones. There are the range of paracetamols (fast-working, slow-working, effervescent tablets), charcoal pills for indigestion or worse, and cough tablets and liquids. The prescription stuff all goes into a special drawer. This is the special place for stuff I must not forget to imbibe every morning.

Then, there are the cables for my devices in the storeroom, documenting the march of technological shifts in the home: USB-As, USB-Cs, micro-USBs, lightning cables… All in over a decade.

Living Legacy

Novelties, novelties and new fashions. All crowding our homes and our heads.

Within this paraphernalia of modern living, we try to stay balanced. We store these in separate places at home, some for use at home, like medications, seasonings and books, and some for use outside the home, like shirts and pants, and socks and shoes. The former categories are not other people’s business generally, while the latter, in contrast, have distinct immediate social functions. These latter, therefore, are much more interesting to talk about, and to disagree over.

I was once told by a wise person that when I interview someone for a job, I should study their shoes more than I should consider the clothes they wear. Since then, I have added hairstyle as among the more important features that are potentially revealing of a person’s character.

It is easy to see why this is the case. I have 30 T-shirts, two dozen long-sleeved shirts and two dozen short-sleeved ones. Of long pants, I may have as many as I have toes.

But shoes that I own? … they number no more than the fingers I have on one hand, if even that. And I prefer my hair to grow and flow as it wishes. And hair grows fast. I don’t vary these two much, and thus, they are possibly more revealing of my character than the clothes I wear.

That much may be true. However, I do not quite believe that clothes are less revealing of the man (or woman). Like most things human, I think clothes are as revealing as they are concealing. That is how humanity works; that is how human perceptions of each other work. There is a deep element of cop and robber about it— a cold war, an arms race, if you prefer.

We may dress to kill; we may dress to conceal. We dress to tell truths; we dress to tell lies. We dress to attract; we dress to repel. We dress to progress; we dress to rebel. In fact, we dress the way we use language—to manage, manipulate and manufacture our individual world.

Intangible Legacy

My vocabulary and wardrobe are some of the most elective and immediate tools I have. Likewise, for everyone else. And with these we fence, we clash, we duel. With them, we both love and hate.

But while language is without doubt a tool of power, it requires an audience. Clothes, on the other hand, only require spectators, and these are more easily available. As a pedestrian on the street—which I am most of the time during a normal day—I am immediately more visible than audible. I am more seen than heard.

This gives reason for why I have so many shirts and trousers, and why I find it hard to throw them away, even the faded ones and the out-of-fashion ones. They are like my books in some sense. I don’t throw my books out because they still have their use, apart from reminding me of who I have been and what I have been interested in.

But what about clothes that don’t even fit anymore, not to mention the torn ones and the ones I wouldn’t be caught dead in—or living in?

Well, I suppose old clothes remind me of how I had wanted to be seen in the recent past, for whatever reason, and in whatever context and era. They are the evident remains of my psychological battles, of my performances, good or bad. Yes, they bear my scars and wounds, my successes and failures. They are my intangible legacy.

But should a passion to spring clean cross my mind one morning, I might chuck them out. Maybe I don’t need reminders of my past as much as I think. Maybe Summer does come after Spring, just as Spring comes after Winter.