Airing Out My Dirty Laundry
(a modern day piece of art)
This isn’t about washing my clothes in river water, hanging them on a line to dry, and waiting for them to smell fresh and like whatever flowers are blooming at the moment.
It’s not about my washer-dryer unit (which is, like me, holding on by a thread).
This is a post about my stains. The blood, sweat, and tear stains that cover my pillows. No amount of bleach will fix them. No Clorox color saver can save them.
They never stood a chance.
Let’s start with the blood. Tiny, reddish-brown dots line the edges of my favorite sheets. If my bed were like the door in the end scene of the Titanic, then I am Rose, holding on through the thirst, the nausea, the headaches, and the bottom-of-my-gut, sick feeling that comes with the surging and retreat of my blood sugar. My fingers, pricked by the flicker of my cell phone, mostly in the middle of the night, have bled or been wiped clean on my once dreamy sheets.
Now, it reminds me a bit of a sacrifice; painting blood over my doorway, a way of saying “keep out” to anyone that shouldn’t be there in my room.
And no one should be here if not you.
The sweat began only after my diagnosis, but now I wake up either shivering with low blood sugar or sweating from every pore in my body. It’s not cute; it’s like I’m stuck in a menopausal horror story. Why? I ask, “We don’t know, it’s just a diabetes thing,” they say.
It’s like being trapped between hell and some sort of mirage, where I am occasionally treated to a slight reprieve.
I used to think that tears were glamorous because of that quote by President JFK about how our tears are made of the exact percentage of salt and water as the sea.
Now I know better. I’ve felt their acid as they’ve chased each other down my cheeks, uninhibited. They’ve never let my nose, lips, or my chin stop them from their lava-like paths.
Your love reminded me of lava, too. In the way that your heat is slow and subdued, and also mesmerizing and potentially deadly. I think I liked that.
Photo by Elizabeth Knapp of North Star Creative Co. Photo
Now, as my molten tears spill over, leaving me hollow inside, I consider my sheets. I think it’s time to replace some of them. Definitely the white ones, probably the light pink ones, and the beige ones, too?
The tears are the hardest stains. They could do modern art if they only dripped me over a canvas. It’s the hardest thing in the world to move on with a constant Rorsachach test of mascara and tear stains beneath you. Always taunting.
Are you crazy? Or are you just trying to sleep with a constant kaleidoscope of your worst nights hanging under your head?