You carried it against your hip the way you once carried nothing that heavy, up the stairs, and set it on the bed still warm, and I was watching, the way I watch everything you set down without looking at it. A basket of clothes, plastic weave the color of a faded pool float, one sock hanging over the rim like a tongue.
You meant to fold it. You will not fold it. That charge, the small guilt of the undone pile, that is mine now. I have taken it.
Tonight the basket will be a boat, and the shirts will be water, and you will row it across a sea that is also your childhood kitchen, and the sock over the edge will trail in the current, and you will not find this strange. The warmth off the dryer will become the warmth of someone standing very close, someone you have been meaning to call.
I will let you fold exactly one towel, perfectly, forever, and it will feel like finishing everything you have ever left half done.
You are afraid the pile means you are behind. You are always a little behind, in your own accounting. So I will make the folding into flying, the towels into wings, and by three you will be gliding over the neighborhood you grew up in, laundry streaming out warm behind you, no basket, no stairs, nothing left to carry up.
Then the light will come in gray at the window and I will lift, the way steam lifts off warm cotton, gone before you name it. You will wake and see the basket, still full, one sock still hanging. You will not remember me. But you will fold it today.
That was the whole errand.