I Know Where the Missing Socks Go
Peter Forberg
I know where the missing socks go. I know because I’ve found them. When you load your socks, wet and crumpled and inside-out, into the metal drum that whirs and winds with the afternoon chores, the heat is not there to warm them. The spin does not untangle them. The minutes, counting down, do not track the time until they are dry as a bone, shrunk and ready to stretch. It tracks the time until they return.
When you load your socks, they are fired off to the homes of Dakar, where they are wrapped together in a towel bindle. Then, a maid quietly brings them up to the roof, where she fills three buckets: one nearly full of suds and bubbles, another half-full and flat, and final bucket completely empty. With a forceful arm, she grabs the socks one by one, dunking them into the suds and pulling them up for air, only to squeeze and stretch and wrestle their limp fabric until they are drowned once again. After a good scrubbing, they are tossed into the second bucket to rest, se reposer, until they are grabbed by the half-dozen, then strung together like unwound strings, and wrung until they won’t give up any more water. Fine, they will give the rest to the sun and the stiff oceanic wind, filled with dust and salt, as they make tiny sails along the clothesline. But one will decide, filled with hatred for all of mankind, that it’s time to escape this endless (rinse) cycle. It will loosen itself from the pin’s grasp and let fly into the rooftops, bouncing off walls and windows until it disappears into the setting winter sun, free at last. You will watch with an unsurprised grimace as the maid chuckles at your misfortune.
You will also try, as it will become your weekly task, to replicate her motions, but your gentle hands will only tickle the socks, your forceful wrung will keep them moist, and your overzealous armful of pins and socks will surely send more of them into the air. At this, she will laugh the whole time.
At home, you will open the drum and pull out all of your socks, except for one. You will lose your sock and buy another, tossing the unmatched pair into the garbage or converting it into a dust rag or accepting that you’ll never have the right length of fabric on both ankles. You will do this many times. You will stop loading dishes in the sink and start filling every rack of the dishwasher with even the most gently used cups of water. You will look up words on your phone as the dictionaries gather dust, and you will handwrite letters only when the opportunity arises, once again searching how to write a cursive “G.” You will reread the rules of board games on the nights that the power goes out, and you’ll ask the candles if they could simply light themselves. You will press “start” on a microwave meal and ask what people used to do before technology. You will forget the names of streets in your neighborhood and become familiar only with the clear blue line that guides you to work and friends and school. Your world will become smaller, a series of connected dots, and the world beyond your window no more a map than a collection of addresses saved by search history. Entire swaths of land will be erased by movies on the backs of airplane headrests, and the bird’s eye view will start to fly blind. You will land in a new city and remember the dot that was your home. You will think of your friends but forget their movements, the tenor of their laughs, the outfits that they never wore on nights out. Instead you will have still images, fractions of the whole.
You’ll find yourself in a new climate and decide to buy new socks. You’ll put the old ones in a box with other unused clothes. They will go unsold at Goodwill and be sent all around the world. 5 years later, you’ll decide that you want to add another point and line to your map, and you will take that trip to that city on the coast in that massive continent everyone says is the next big thing. You’ll meet a man on a fishing dock who speaks no English and has no fondness for the US wearing a dusty “Hard Rock Cafe” baseball cap and two socks: one that doesn’t match the other.
Your lost socks are in Dakar, and no, I’m not going to bring them back.
This post is dedicated to the alleyway behind our apartment in Chicago. When we take out the trash, we have to quickly open the gate to the dumpsters and then throw away the bag before the gate closes in order to avoid getting locked out. Once, I threw away a bag and a big mess of tin foil, shaped exactly like the food it housed, escaped the bag and flew into the wind. Later, while walking to work, about 2 blocks away and obscured by buildings, that piece of tin foil flew into my back, and I threw it away.
