Trapped in Forever

23 ~ The Bitter Taste of Wordlessness

. . .

Amidst the still and near silent air that surrounded us as I sat on one of the orange chairs with a crack splitting the orange material along the back of it, the cracked line looking like one of the naked tree branches dangling in the wind and scratching against window panes in my yard, watching as Orion lifted his wicker laundry basket on top of one of the occupied washing machines, vibrating beneath the wicker, and propped open the lid to another washing machine, the white cap of his Tide detergent sticking out of the corner of the beige wicker basket, all I could hear was the heavy rumbling of the few occupied washing machines that aligned in the center of the room over the dirty, scuffed tiles on the ground, shaking with vibrations, and the faint rattling of what sounded like spare changes escaping from someone’s back pocket.

I curled my fingers over the edge of the orange chair, feeling the rough end pressing into the buried bones of my fingers, and scratched at the coarse, bumpy plastic, as he tipped the wicker basket toward the opened washing machine, multicolored attire tumbling into the washer and out of sight, and then he dropped the basket at his feet before unscrewing the cap to his bottle of Tide, grasped in his fingers. After pouring dark azure liquid in the cap and then letting it run down into the washer with the clothes, drizzling the blue detergent at the rim of the cap, he glanced over the white, propped lid of the machine and over at me, seated in the orange chair at the back of the room, alongside a Vera Bradley bag resting against the chair beside me,  and the woman who knitted the yellow scarf, looking up the top of her knitting needles every now and then at her vibrating machine before looping the yellow yarn back through the needle, dangling over her lap.

“Hey,” he mumbled, when I caught his gaze, and he smiled, faintly, before his hazel gaze flickered over to the woman knitting and another guy, bent over in front of one of the drying machines, reaching a hand in and gripping handfuls of his clothing and dropping it in a basket, wearing a sweatshirt stained at the sides with holes in the elbows, revealing his dry patches of skin. I turned away from the scratchy, white-ish skin poking through the hole on his shirt, when I heard the washing machine lid close with a faint, muffled bang, and I flicked my eyes just in time to see Orion amble over to the orange seats.

When he stood over me, hunched over slightly to grasp the patched, variegated handle of the Vera Bradley and lifted it up off of the seat beside me, carrying it onto the ground and setting it on the abraded, black and white tiles of the floor by the woman’s other, larger bag, filled with different, bright shades of yarn. Then he slid into the chair beside me, the old, worn plastic creaking faintly beneath his weight, and he blew out a sigh through his lips, and then glanced over at me.

“Did you like the CD?” he asked after a moment, a moment that he simply stared at me, almost tiredly, but not in the way I expected him to—I expected him to look at me, like he was exasperated by having me tag along with him, washing dishes and watching him do his laundry. Instead, he just looked tired, but not of me.

I nodded, uncurling my fingers around the edge of the orange, plastic chair and placing my hands in my lap, only to start chipping further away at the waning amount of black nail polish on my thumbnail, little speckles of black decorating the skin around my nail fold and falling onto my skinny jeans. “Yeah, I did,” I told him, and it was the truth. When I laid back on my bed, feet propped up against the wall, and eyes closed, with my earbuds tucked into my ears and drowning out the voices of my parents until they crawled into their bed, the old springs squeaking in protest, and the snoring filling the dark room, and blasting soundtracks from The Dark Knight, I felt almost at peace, or at least content for then, until the world woke up again. Then my mother’s lips would purse once more, my dad would overcompensate by baking, cooking, or talking about the benefits of flossing, or something, and Mikayla would sulk around, back hunched, and crimped hair tumbling down her shoulders, and I would have to tuck the music away until later, when the world decided the day was long enough and left me to the dramatic percussion composed by Hans Zimmer.