The static gets me every time. You pull two socks apart and there's that tiny crackle, a spark you can barely feel, sometimes a blue flash if the room's dark enough. That's electricity. Actual electricity, generated by cotton rubbing cotton, happening in my hands while I fold, and I never used to think about it once.
I fold standing at the foot of the bed. Warm shirts straight from the dryer, that smell, the way a fitted sheet fights you and loses. My kid's shirts are getting bigger. I can measure a year in the size of the pile.
Up there you learn the numbers. All the air we've got, the whole sky, every cloud and jet stream and breath any of us will ever take, it's a layer thinner around the planet than the skin on an apple. You could see it edge-on at sunrise, this faint blue rind, and past it just black that goes on with no bottom. Everything that has ever happened, happened inside that rind.
So this. A plastic basket of warm laundry, the socks still full of little sparks, the shirts that fit a body I love, all of it sitting in the only breathable pocket in a hundred million miles.
I match the socks.
I take my time.