On a white shirt, in white capitals, the words I HAD POTENTIAL sit above a curved ramp that descends from left to right. At the upper left ledge, where the ramp begins, there is a dashed empty circle. At the lower right, on the flat, a solid white ball rests. The ramp is not a straight diagonal; it bows, the way a slide bows, the way a road bows when it is going somewhere it cannot see. The dashed circle is the size of the ball. It is the ball’s outline, or its absence, or its former position. The shirt does not say which.
I keep looking at the dashed circle. It is the only part of the drawing that is not filled in, and it is the part that carries the sentence. The ball at the bottom is solid, present, accounted for. The circle at the top is a hole in the shape of what used to be there. The words above it say I had potential, past tense, and the drawing says: here is where it was, and here is where it went. The joke is not that the ball fell. The joke is that the shirt has drawn the fall as a diagram, with a dashed line where the object should be, as if potential were a thing that could be plotted and then removed.
I am not a physicist. I took the required course in college and retained the vocabulary without the math. But I know a potential well when I see one, or I know the shape of one, which is enough for a shirt. In physics, potential energy is the energy an object has because of where it is. A ball at the top of a ramp has more of it than a ball at the bottom. The shirt’s ramp is curved, which means the ball would accelerate as it descended, which means the potential at the top was real, measurable, convertible. The dashed circle is not a mistake in the drawing. It is the drawing’s way of saying that the potential was there, and then it was not, and the ball is fine, thank you, it is resting on the flat.
The phrase I had potential is a common one, and the shirt is not the first to use it. The retail listing calls it a “Funny Physics Pun Sarcastic Minimalist Quote,” which is a lot of adjectives for a sentence that is mostly a diagram. The pun is in the double meaning of potential: the everyday sense of promise, the physics sense of stored energy. The shirt does not choose between them. It lets the dashed circle do the work. If you read the sentence as a regret, the dashed circle is the shape of what you did not become. If you read it as a physics joke, the dashed circle is the initial condition, the height from which the ball was released. Either way, the ball is at the bottom, solid, white, unbothered.
I have been thinking about the shirt as a document of a particular kind of self-description. There is a genre of shirt that announces a former self: I used to be cool, I was a gifted child, I had potential. The joke is always the gap between the announcement and the present tense. The shirt is worn by someone who is not claiming to be potential now. The shirt is a receipt. The dashed circle is the amount that was once on deposit.
What makes this one different is the diagram. A sentence alone would be a complaint. The ramp and the ball make it an argument. The argument is: potential is positional. It depends on where you are standing. The ball at the top of the ramp had potential because of the ramp, not because of the ball. The ball at the bottom has none, or has less, or has converted it into motion and then into rest. The shirt does not say the ball is unhappy. The ball is a solid white circle on a flat white ledge. It looks like it is done.
I find that oddly comforting, which may be the wrong response to a sarcastic shirt. The dashed circle is empty, but it is also precise. It is the exact size and shape of the ball. It is not a vague absence; it is a measured one. The shirt has taken the trouble to draw the outline of what is missing. That is more than most regrets do. Most regrets are shapeless. This one has a radius.
The shirt is sold by Quirky Cotton Collective, and you can find it here. The listing describes it as a “Funny Physics Pun Sarcastic Minimalist Quote,” which is accurate in the way that a label on a jar is accurate: it tells you the category, not the flavor. The design is white on white, which means it is legible mostly by texture and shadow, the way a dashed line is legible mostly by what it leaves out. I have not worn it. I have only looked at the image, which is enough to see that the ramp is curved and the circle is dashed and the ball is solid, and that the sentence above them is in the past tense.
There is a version of this essay that would turn the shirt into a lesson about not measuring yourself by your former height. I am not interested in that version. The shirt is not a lesson. It is a diagram of a conversion. Potential became motion, motion became rest, and the rest is what you see at the bottom of the ramp. The dashed circle is the before. The solid ball is the after. The shirt does not say which one is better. It just draws both, and lets you stand in front of the mirror and decide which one you are.
I keep coming back to the dashed circle because it is the only part of the drawing that is not finished. The ball is finished. The ramp is finished. The words are finished. The circle is an outline, a plan, a place where something used to be. It is the visual equivalent of the word had. The shirt is not asking you to mourn the circle. It is asking you to notice that the circle is the same size as the ball. The potential was not imaginary. It was the ball, at a different height.
That is the argument I want to make about this shirt: it is not a joke about failure. It is a joke about conservation. The ball did not disappear. It moved. The potential did not vanish. It became something else. The dashed circle is not a ghost; it is a coordinate. The shirt is a small, white-on-white proof that the thing you had was real, and that it went somewhere, and that the somewhere is the flat part at the bottom, where the ball is resting, solid, accounted for, done.
This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.
