My Favorite T-Shirt

The story with this shirt.
As a second child who idolized her older sister, I highly and so patiently anticipated getting what I preemptively selected as hand-me-down items, this shirt being one of them. She was quite the fashionista and had very long and dedicated relationships with her clothes, shoes, and accessories while I, for lack of more accurate terms, was a bit more… sporty. So for years, I would wait, wish, and pray for her to feel like she had no use out of something of hers I liked; often to no avail. I loved this particular shirt while I was in elementary school. I didn’t quite understand that Brooklyn was an actual place, much less a city that people lived and grew up in. Rather, I understood that the word “Brooklyn” meant Hip Hop, and that was more than enough to quench my infatuation. I secretly pleaded to the hand-me-down gods for my sister to finally be sick of this shirt so I could be rewarded such a glorious rag, something so iconic to me of Hip Hop culture and music.
Decades later, I’m preparing for my big move to New York to pursue a career in Theater. I’m in the process of the painstakingly meticulous task of digging through every nook and cranny of the house I mostly lived and grew up in, trashing and organizing years of memories, treasures, refrigerator art projects, movie ticket stubs, trophies, picture albums, and, of course, clothes. I stumble across some hand-me-downs that failed to reach down to my hands, with this shirt wedged between. I became nostalgic, and not knowing exactly where in NY I would actually be living, I brought it with me in case coincidence decided to play a little joke on me.
I took my first flight to visit my family from my new home, Brooklyn NY, wearing this shirt.
Here’s to my favorite piece of clothing; Only fitting that it came from my favorite person: my big sister.