Everyone Has That One Pair Of Jeans They Hate

These jeans are terrible in a way that defies both physics and common sense. Yes, you can look at them and grasp their most visible flaws at once. Rise? Too short. Wash? Too faded, like actually going in two clearly defined stripes down the front of my fucking legs. Pockets that go in the wrong place? Naturally. Some weird shit happening with the bottom of them, whereby they hit my ankles in a way that makes me want to just actually saw my legs off and get it over with? Why, yes. Obviously all that stuff is present. Also, you’d think the waistband would be too cutty and tight, but in fact it is TOO LOOSE. MY SHIRT FALLS OUT.

There is something else happening with these jeans, though. I am just going to come out and say it: they are cursed. I am just going to throw the word “bewitched” out there. “Poisoned.” “A bad magic trick has been played on me.” “Wrong.” “I cannot.”

These jeans make me feel like a loser. They make me feel like someone will soon make me participate in a flash mob. They make me feel like I am wearing that kind of hat which is called a poorboy hat. They make me feel like I am the Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, or else a stand-up comedian, or else the worst animal in a zoo. An animal that no one can care about except to laugh at briefly, such as this deer. They make me feel like I have prominent tusks. They make me feel like that one particularly hectic crying emoji: 😩. Or else like this:

When I was like sixteen years old, I got exceptionally high at this one party. Just blazed beyond all recognition, and that particular feeling of being high when you are a teenager, when there is a small part of you that is sincerely afraid that you will never get over it, and that you will now be forced to move abjectly through this world forever as a broken, stoned person. Anyway. I was standing at the table where the food was, trying to talk to someone I vaguely knew. She, too, was having a hard time, weed-wise.

We were standing there trying to string a sentence together, and I noticed that she was eating what were obviously the worst chips on the table. There were all kinds of nice chips available, but this girl was kind of grimly making her way through the most nastiest ones. I asked her why, and she told me that it was because she felt lonely for them. She said she felt worried that no one was going to eat them, and that they would be sad because they would know they were unpopular. I started to laugh, and then a cold, paranoid certainty washed over me. This girl, clearly, was trying to tell me something. She was trying to tell me that I, Rosa, was the kind of chips that no one likes. Everyone was just nice to me because they didn’t want me to know what a giant loser I actually was. It was so OBVIOUS. I excused myself, and went and looked at my face in the bathroom mirror for I would say forty-five minutes. This is how these jeans make me feel, today. How are these jeans allowed to get away with it?

“You should throw them away, then,” you say. “You should stop talking about this and throw them the eff away.” I can’t. I have tried. They get put in the bag to go to the charity shop, and then just as I think I am free of them, I find myself pulling them back out. Maybe they are not so bad, I think. Maybe I just need a different kind of T-shirt. It’s not the jeans’ fault I don’t have good T-shirts. Here we come to the heart of the matter. These jeans are so bad that they make me blame myself. They will not rest until they have defeated me entirely. These jeans are so, so terrible. I will never be rid of them.