Laundry: A Comprehensive Guide

Laundry

A Comprehensive Guide

written by: Sam

 

1. Get the clothes out of the dryer. The edge of clean still smells like her, the softness of her palms and fingers, but you knew that. You always knew that. You knew that when you met her, and you knew that when she left. It’s the price you pay, and you’ve pretended to make peace with it.

2. Remember that this detergent is a detergent that thousands, possibly millions, possibly billions of people use. She is not special. Try to say this without lying to yourself.

3. If you can’t do that, switch the detergent—better to surrender the useless battles in favor of the bigger ones, no matter how needlessly expensive the other brand is.

4. The clothes may be wrinkled because you could not get up yesterday to fold them, the way an elephant presses on your chest and makes your heart feel like the weight of an entire person inside of it. When you don’t take the laundry out of the dryer within an hour, it gets wrinkled. You hate the iron, and you don’t know how to do it without burning yourself at least once, and she did the ironing because of that, she did the ironing, but now she is gone, and you must do the ironing all on your own! So maybe you should learn from that and stop leaving the clothes in the dryer so long. But sometimes it’s like the sheets are your armor, and if you get out of bed, pain will crush you anew.

5. Iron.

6. Burn your finger. Twice. Suck the hurt into your mouth and see if you can suck away your entire body as well. See if you can leave an empty space next to the pile of her-smelling laundry for a moment—see if the elephant still decimating your ribcage takes a break. (Spoiler: it will not. Tricks only work so many times.)

7. Fold. But your hands don’t remember how to fold. They remember how to touch her face, always so warm and gentle, they remember how to twist into hers, they remember how to stifle a scream and a sob, and how to clutch a beating heart tight enough that the blood and the flesh and the mess blur the unbearable agony of an unfinished love. A love that feels like a folded-over page but (and you know this, but at night you cannot make yourself believe) has been slammed shut and torn like paper-thin skin.

8. So don’t fold. One of these days you’ll work up the courage, but that day has not come yet.

9. The underwear drawer of your dresser hasn’t shut smoothly since you got it, which never really bothered you until this exact moment. Kick it if it makes you feel better.

10. It doesn’t, and of course it never will. The reason you can’t stand that crooked drawer is because she promised you she’d fix it, or her dad would come by and help if she couldn’t. How could you ruin this? How in the name of every single god you can think of could you let her leave you when this drawer is still waiting for her? You’ve never had a dog before, but you imagine that this is something like that. How could you leave me when this dog is still sitting by the door every day when I get home, and sitting even after I take off my shoes because he thinks you will be following me inside?

11. Forget the underwear drawer. Put everything on the floor to join the pile of laundry from last week, where your ironing and your burns will go to waste. Crawl into the safe space between the mattress and the sheets where your armor can enclose you, and you can pretend the world has shrunk to include only you.

12. But the thought of a world without her may hurt too much too soon. You’d rather live in a world where she breaks your heart a million times than a world where you never feel it. So let your safety expand to her too, and in this unfathomable existence where it is you and an impossibility, stop holding your breath.

13. Maybe you will be able to fall asleep now.