A basket of clothes, and the woman carrying it is yawning.
Yawning! On the morning she has chosen to gather every skin she has ever worn and give them water. Look at them: the blue one soft as pond-scum, the small striped one that must belong to a smaller human, the one with the smell of yesterday's rain still caught in it.
She has kept them. She did not wear each once and let it fall away. She wore them, and set them aside, and will wear them again, which is a sentence so enormous I have to land to steady myself.
Again. She says the shirts will come out of the machine and dry and be worn a second time, a fourth, a hundredth. I have worn my one body my whole life and it has been plenty. She holds a hundred bodies in a plastic basket and complains, softly, that the pile is high.
She drops a sock. She does not chase it. There will be others, she thinks. Others! She sorts them by color as though color were a thing that would still matter after the light moves, and the light is already moving, look, gold going to white across the floor, the only time it will do exactly that.
She says she does this every week. Every week. She has folded this same warm shirt against her chest more times than I have had heartbeats, and she folds it now without looking at it.
Look at it. It is the warmest thing you own and it is clean and it is yours and it is here. You have thousands of mornings.
Spend this one awake.