Just

When I enter the basement laundry room the warmth from several running dryers settles over me like summer as a child. The bleach we use on the rags, the humidity from the damp linens fills the room with thoughts of the swimming pool. The plunge that saturates you in blue, and as you lay, drying off on the concrete, everything’s quiet. The wind places your hair across your face. Like a sheet on a clothesline, the wind has the potential to blow you anyway it wants and all the people you love or loved in the past will keep you pinned to the mental souvenirs you have hammered into the ground. These are the thoughts that comfort me when I can think of nothing but dark.

“Morning” mumbles Ashley from the corner, she is filling her bucket with gloves and a bottle of liquid Commat.

“Morning Ashley”

“How are you?” Like someone who is trying to speak English, or a child who is trying to talk, Ashley is difficult to understand. I assume she says a one syllable word for “I’m awake, I’m alive, and I’m here”. I assume she says “good.”

“That’s good. how many units do you have today?” I ask.

Without looking up she pulls her crumbled worksheet from her employee jacket “oh three” she says.

“Not bad.”

When she looks up I can see the bright blue drugstore mascara that is coated on her eyelashes like an oil painting. If she told me she was forty, I’d believe her. If she told me she was twenty one, I’d believe her.

I wait for her to ask me why I’m here.

“How many do you have?” She putters out.

I unfold my worksheet, I have three, but it will only be two if I’m lucky. “Three”

She nods her head and I wait for her to ask me why I’ve chosen this place. I wait for her to beg me to run back to you, to go write down what I know, all the wisdom I’ve obtained in my years. For the chili recipe she had on New Year’s Eve.

She walks to the fridge and places her tupperware of casserole on the bottom shelf, below Juan’s six pack of Diet Coke.

I stand still by my bucket of cleaning supplies and wait for her to ask me what I know, for all my fleeting advice. I wait for her to hug me, to reassure a preacher’s tongue.

“Have a good day.” She says as she creaks open the heavy door and exits, letting in the nine below temperatures with her. What a crummy, generic collection of last words to hear.

There are wooden lockers on the opposite side of the dryers, I take off my boots and feel the cracked concrete below my cold, sock covered feet. I put on my white tennis shoes, they remind me of my grandparents. I place my boots on my backpack in an upper locker and secure it with a deadlock. I trust everyone here, but “it only takes one” as my parents would say. Then I place the key on the counter beside the refrigerator. I wonder who will find it, who will claim my five year old boots as their own when I'm gone.

I yawn quietly to myself and ponder the morning. Who am I? What’s my name? I don’t have one, not really. Are these really the last pair of jeans I’ve decided to wear? I almost cry over the thought and think about the all pink leotard and piano key leggings I tried to wear every day in kindergarten. I think of the blue of Ashley’s mascara, I think of my mother. I think of my last word…“three.”

“Three is the number of artists.” You told me, and now I sit here, it’s not profound, I’m just trying to find all the places where thirds fit together. Paintings on coffee shop walls, my two siblings and I sitting in the backseat of our childhood vulvo. A clover. The trinity. Our two bodies intertwined, our one soul in the middle. The panel of windows at my grandparents cabin, so large they let in the forest. Carly’s cigarette everyday at three o’clock.

“Something to take the edge off” She’d tell me.

Jesus’ death.

I stand up and grab my cleaning bucket, my list says Unit B3 first. This is all the way across the snow blown property. Maybe I’ll finally let the wind blow me wherever it chooses, just for a moment, just for a second, just.