Resilience

When time went wide, Robbie went deep.

That’s why, fifteen months into the pandemic, he’d reignited all his social accounts with exhortations—even etiquettes. He’d resiled his narrative without apology as things changed. He had nothing to apologize for. As a resident of his parents’ basement, as someone who performatively masked up to take out the garbage, as a man long without a lover to swap spit with, or to embrace—

Robbie embraced a truth that many feared to give utterance to: that certain types had found joy in all this. He was among them.

Early on, he’d rallied around mental health, encouraging friends to emote. But God, was he bad at active listening. Even over text (especially over text), he was interrupting just to say

tell me more

or

I want to hear ur full perspective

So now work-from-home was his pandemic theme. He’d long been fired from his tech job. But one night the white gleam-in-the-dark of the washer had sparked the idea of a laundry service. Now he serviced his friends at $10/basket, which included unlimited line-drying.

The group loved it, with some irony. Still, he had locktight protocols, and it was a new way to almost interact. They were still employed, tight on time for chores. They were working more than ever from home, they claimed, but they were also training for marathons, baking bread, and growing their own weed all of a sudden.

Robbie would trundle over to the machines, gut winding over the waistline of his boxers. There was a thrill to the process. He would paw the loose items—Amy’s, Bryce’s, Tom’s, or Tom’s cousin, TJ’s—from the watery depths of the washer and into the dryer, and he’d feel close to whichever human being.

They dropped him one by one after Amy unearthed a dead cicada in her basket. People lost tolerance around missing socks, and there was a soy sauce stain he was powerless against.

Well, what the fuck did Amy expect, exactly? He’d set the basket under the tree in the backyard precisely at 6:15. Nature was what happened when you didn’t show up on time. Nature wrought airborne menaces.

What did she really think, that he’d been fondling her tiny bras? He air-dried her tiny bras.

And so, like all things lately: the laundry service died just as it was starting to mean something.

He gorged on chips that night. Their dust streaked his phone screen. As he tapped into the latest Bloomberg report, today’s date jumped out: June 21, 2021. It took his mind a while to clunk along and place that on his mental calendar, to register the season, the year, the number of months left in the year, the number of years likely left in his own life, and what those meant to him, what they could still, maybe, mean to other people— 

Robbie let his phone slip through his fingers. And then he stuck an unwashed fist in his mouth, and he began to scream.