My mom found the brown belt on my dresser last month and held it up like evidence in a trial. “This is a nice belt,” she said, in the tone she uses when she’s actually saying “why do you own eleven belts and one nice one.” She’s not wrong that I have a lot of belts. She’s wrong about why. It’s not indecision. It’s that a belt is the one accessory that quietly reports on how you actually live, and mine have been telling on me for years.
The brown one is buy number two in the good column this year, six bucks at my Tuesday store, the one with the volunteer who restocks like she’s trying to win a war.
Leather, real leather, I checked, because I’ve been burned by “genuine leather” that was mostly vibes and glue. I’ve worn it something like forty times since March. That’s fifteen cents a wear, which I did the math on twice because the first number felt like a typo.
The gripe, and it’s a real one, is holes. Every belt I own has holes placed for a person who is not me on a Tuesday versus a person who is not me after Thanksgiving, and I am somehow neither of those people on any given day. The good ones give you five holes with breathing room. The cheap ones give you three and a prayer.
Here’s where the actual fight starts, and it’s not about the leather at all. My coworker at the homeware brand thinks a belt should be decorative, a whole statement, big brass buckle, the kind of thing you notice before you notice the person. I think that’s insane. I want a belt that does its job and disappears, because my life involves running for the bus and crouching to find dropped screws at work, not standing around being looked at. She thinks that’s a sad way to dress. I think her buckle would leave a bruise on a crowded train. We have never resolved this and we’re not going to.
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The gamble pick is a wide western style one I bought for fourteen dollars in a moment of confidence I did not earn. It’s not me.
I said that out loud in the store and bought it anyway because the price per wear math, if I wore it even eight times, worked out fine. I’ve worn it three times. Twice by accident, once on purpose. The math is currently insulting.
The one I keep reaching for stays the plain brown leather one, holes be damned, because it disappears into whatever I’m wearing and never once made me late fixing a buckle at 7am. My mom would still say I have too many. She’s not wrong. She’s just not the one keeping the ledger.
