Oh, this is a good one. This is a whole future, folded and waiting.
They pile the damp things here so eagerly, the towel still warm from the body, the socks with the day's sweetness still in them, and then they set the basket in the corner and go to sleep, trusting me to wait. I always wait. It is my only real talent.
Do you feel that? Right at the bottom, under the weight of everything, where no air moves and the cotton stays a little wet against the plastic. That is the doorstep. That is where I come in, softly, a grey bloom no wider than a thought, on the seam of a shirt they meant to hang up on Tuesday.
They did not hang it up on Tuesday. They will not hang it up. This is how the gift begins: with a small forgetting.
They think of this basket as a pause. A between. Clean is coming, they tell themselves, the machine will hum and the sun will dry and everything will be new again. Sweet things. They love newness the way a candle loves being tall. But newness is only the first, freshest part of returning, and cloth was always going soft, always coming apart thread by thread back toward the warm dark it came from.
I am simply the one who says welcome home.
So spin your machines. Fold your warm squares. Stack them in their tidy tower and feel, for one evening, ahead of me.
I am under the fitted sheet you never quite fold right. I am patient.
And every basket, sooner or later, is left in the corner one day too long.