Someone Folded My Laundry (Excerpt)

Someone folded my laundry without asking.

I knew before I saw it.

The dry clothes were stacked neatly on a chair outside my room, still warm from the sun. I was in the backyard carrying out the next load when I saw them, folded in a way that suggested time had been taken. Not rushed. Not corrected. Just done. Something practical. Something quiet. The certainty that someone has taken care of what you would have done yourself.

I did not grow up expecting things to be done for me. If something needed doing, it stayed undone until I did it.

Now, when I see care, I catalogue it. I wonder if other people move through their days assuming there is someone who will fold their laundry. I wonder what that does to a person, to grow up inside that assumption. I have wanted to be soft for a long time, without knowing how.

Later that morning I asked Warren if he had a telescope we could use to look at the stars. He said yes and led me to the garage, where two boxes sat unopened. He lifted the lid on one of them. Black, dusty but new. A National Geographic telescope still in its packaging.

I touched the box, then stepped back.

He said he would assemble it later. I believed him.

I learned early how to assemble things myself. Not well. Not patiently. But quickly enough that no one else had to step in. Pieces forced into place. Instructions skipped. Something always slightly off.

Standing in the garage doorway, I felt the urge to take the box from him, to say I could manage it myself.

I did not.

I let the telescope remain unopened.

From an ongoing manuscript exploring memory, place, and the quiet structures of care.

My Mother Was My First Heartbreak

The first time someone told me they wanted to die, it was my mother.

We were in a car park. I remember the light on the bonnet.

Everything looked normal, which felt like a mistake.

I thought that if I stayed still, the moment might not attach itself to me.

It did.

After that, I started noticing what people said when they thought no one was listening.

Not the big ones. The small ones. The things said too quickly to take back.

That was the first time I understood that words don’t just describe a life. They decide what is allowed to exist inside it.

Two Keys (Excerpt)

From a longer work currently under submission.

There were always two versions of things: the one that could be said, and the one that had to be managed.

At thirteen, writing became the only space that felt lockable. I kept a diary with a small silver key. I wrote as if the page were a room I could enter alone. The lock was more symbolic than secure.

I had one key. My mother had two.

She used to joke about it in front of her friends, laughing that I had one key and she had two. They laughed with her. The lock was mostly decorative. Control did not depend on access. It depended on who was allowed to look.

When I found out she had read the diary, my hands shook. I remember the heat in my face before I remember the words. In one entry I called her a stupid bitch. She said I was disrespectful. I said she should not read what was not hers.

After that, I never wrote without imagining someone standing behind me—in the driveway, in the car, outside my bedroom door.

Watching.

The pages stopped being confessions.

They became performances.

I learned to write what could survive being read.