I’m not sure when my washing machine started behaving with the grace of manic jazz, like a mechanical Charlie Parker going around and around and rumbling like a pickup truck on a bumpy road. I spent time thinking that if Schrödinger had had this model he wouldn’t have put his cat in any box. I, who a while before had placed the soap and fabric softener in their minimal and almost ceremonial box, had been advancing in the choreography with the ease of a Lithuanian tightrope walker: approaching the machine, opening the round door like a surprised eye, clothes that were previously scattered on the floor and press the power button with a slight movement of the wrist, close the door with your hip as if it were a tango that evaporates on an empty beach and let the smoke from a cigarette that I hold with my lips drenched my eyes with tears; cross the kitchen, greet the cat and wait the two hours and fifteen minutes that the program lasts, reading a book or bothering the neighbors with the typewriter and finding an ink butterfly that escapes diagonally.
But it happens, alas, that between so many white socks, between so many half-faded shirts and those pants in a frank process of surrender to time, something is always missing or something is left over; something is transfigured in the world every time I turn on that rotating cosmos. A left sock without its right pair – you might have seen it – a foreign intruder in my closet, another absentee who perhaps a while ago had taken Villadiego’s to some unknown dimension in which the lost pieces of my clothing formed improbable constellations, uneven and laughing. of the textile order that we consider natural. Something had to happen between detergent and spin so that portals opened to a country of orphans with the smell of lavender. Sometimes I wonder if all those socks that I lose are out there, on the other side of reality, gathered in incestuous and unsightly pairs; stumbling through a limbo of cotton and polyester, still wet and confused, longing to go home.
#Socks
