ritual

The washing machine drum turned its silent, mechanical ritual, and I watched it as if hypnotized, sitting on cold bath tiles. The world, reduced to soap and rotating fabrics. The soaked, tangled shapes - like a drowned hope - were rotting into the glass, rising and falling in a rhythm that had neither the beginning nor the end, only a monotonous, floating eternity. The green icon on the panel shone like hieroglyphs from the world where everything was still meaningful: drilling, rinsing, emollient. At least the machine knew what he was doing. She was honest than me.

The tongue was too sweet, the taste of a long cold coffee - a failed attempt to awaken something that seemed to sleep for a long time. All right, I repeated myself. The roof over the head, the belly full. Everything. Okay. Words crawled without weight, like dry flour through your fingers. They didn't mean anything. They didn't change anything. fatigue was deeper than muscles, deeper than bones; He was penetrated into the desire to want the core itself.

Sharp beep interrupted the trance.

When I opened the door, I removed the clothes - clean, wet and heavy.But and what to do with them?

That weight. Not only in the tissues that absorb water, but also in my own hands, shoulders, neck. Anchor pulling back to the twilight of the bathtub, to the hypnotic drum rotation. For a moment, she wanted to just run a basket, let her turn into cold tiles, and return to bed and turn into a ball that doesn't remember and wait for anything.

But I didn't do it.

Instead, slowly, as if carrying some fragile relic, I went to the balcony. A gust of cool night's air bounced in the face - brought wet asphalt and the smell of flowers that blooms somewhere. The city flickered with a distant, sad light, like a giant animal that could not fall asleep from pain. The dots of foreign lives in the windows are the bluish light of the TV, the warm coziness of the kitchen.

I took the clothes one by one. I pressed the cold, coarse wooden pins with my fingers, the spring's weak resistance under the thumb was the only real thing at that moment. I worn them to the rope. What an absurd, what is a small rebellion against meaninglessness - hanging clean laundry at night. The sheets. Shirts. Two lonely shade of socks. Each movement was slow, thoughtful, almost ceremonial.

When I lifted the last - white pillow case - and the basket remained empty, something inside subsided. Clothing that had just been heavy, formless mass, has now swayed over the lights of the street lights.

White sails raised in the wind of the night.

The weight did not disappear anywhere. But now it was carried by the wind.