Wash and Dry

Sunday, March 03, 2013

Stark dawn oozes into gray haze this early Sunday morning. The ritual of wash and drive, the precarious tumble of loose clothing after a long nights toss and turn, winter’s brittle pieces beginning to crack and fade, stiff melting into something soft and tender, flowing with the intense brooded-over relief, warm-blooded fools like me ache for, a Goldilocks locked into a cycle of too hot or two cold when always desperate for just right.

I am not alone in being alone (as the old song says) as this stretch of Kennedy Boulevard yawns with emptiness, the usual gush of traffic caught in desperately needed sleep, me, waking early from a middle of the night sweat to shiver and make my way into the world of routine – wash and dry, tumble and roll, arms and legs entwined in a paid-for warmth I can’t access only watch from the outside, envious of the shirt or skirt that tumbles from one cycle to another, aching for the heat they exchange, forced to wait that painful last moment until the tumbling halts and the participants fumble with button and zipper, or the hook of the brazier caught in the mechanism, reminding me of the 16-year-old usher I once was in that theater balcony struggling to undo the same contraption, though the reward for this accomplishment won’t live up to the same expectation now as it did then, wash and rive, fold, then wander back to the street where the sleep deprived stumbling along the sidewalks as if from a scene out of the Night of the Living Dead.

Wash and dry, bags over my shoulder as I make my was to the next stop in this Station of the Cross, this Passion play full of lashes and crowns of thorns.