Laundry

You’ve been wearing the same jeans for ten days. Sometimes the hours roll into one and you can’t remember having washed, dried, folded, ironed, put away any of the ten or so items you wear repetitively. Notice how even though you might be the person to become seduced by jackets and white shirts, boots and rings, you don’t have the capacity to exercise the array of these clothing items on your body, so they sit, untouched, unremembered. Once-worn singlets, with red wine memories, late night black tights—grazed and muddied from the grounds you let yourself fall onto.

And then, the slight dark marks on garments that the washing machine forgot. Faded reds from overused detergent—it’s inconsistent, see, this process of cleanliness. This descent into dirtiness. And it turns into a medley of over-thinking; you try to stay clean, but you wipe your hands on your clothes still, like a seven-year-old girl. You remember to do the washing but get the dosage wrong and the jackets still smell like midnight rain, tobacco that isn’t yours.

You can’t separate yourself from those garments, they are you, the fabrics mold to the geography of your body, they are you. Stained, like you.

Yesterday you Googled signs of chaos to remind yourself you were right. You still flinch at slamming doors, a broken dish, a white couch, there are days you yell so loud you’d swear it was someone else’s voice in your throat.

The secrets express themselves in grief clogged saliva.
The anger in the pits of your belly that doesn’t bubble, but stays stagnant.
Passions are clogged in the undercurrents.
Buried in the rubble. Etched in the stone walls of your unsaid.
Ancient and immortal like hieroglyphs.

inside your walls are cells, memories within those cells, some belong to you, some belong to others

Others who you extended your outstretched palm to.
Others that walk beside you and try to love you with observations about your changing face shape and the scar near your right eye.
Others you’ve sat in parks with.
Ate dinners in bed with.
Read poetry with.
Coming in and then out
being controlled between your extremes of voracious love
and catatonic aloofness.
You know what you do.

You draw people in like the intensity of a homemade fire, and cast them out like decayed wood. You’re becoming creative with your goodbyes.
And when someone insists they want to stay, you’ll tell them that they were more disappointing than your own childhood.

But no-one has insisted yet.

And you tell yourself I told you so, and reaffirm your shadow belief—that you have a clearly marked exit sign attached to you.
Even you get fed up with your own inconsistencies.

You’d rather call these Spontaneous… Spontaneous.
Erratic. Maybe Inconsistent.
But to you, these aren’t products of flightiness or lack of depth, but the opposite. They are just a drive to express your ideas about an all-encompassing energy in the confines of this physical world.
And underlying it all is the uniting principle of love, as broken as that is. Expressed in many different ways, unshakeable and infinite at its core.

But you struggle with these, don’t you?

You see a psychologist because it’s easier to blame others for your problems. You sit in front of a well-dressed woman, older than you, trying to make you feel comfortable with her assortment of soft office colors and pictures of her dog next to her degrees. She’s sweet. Her sweetness makes you lose respect for her. Where is her authority?
why do the ends of her sentences reach unimaginable highs
You find yourself becoming very agitated.
Your voice drops lower than the earth as you answer her in passive tones, detached logical explanations of why you hate the world.

She forgives you because you’re 20 at this point, and the soft tilt of her head aims to say We all know how hard it is to be young.

In that moment you realize why there are so many caricatures and satires created around therapy. It strikes you as a ridiculous concept. But of course, it’s your negative ego wounds that are responding in this way.

When someone speaks to you too sweetly, you become suspicious.
When someone speaks to you too abruptly, you become hurt.
When someone speaks to you passively, you become agitated.
When someone speaks to you simply, you walk away.

But when no-one speaks to you at all, you’re reminded of what loneliness feels like and suddenly all the dirty memories of being left alone in myriad circumstances come rushing back and you throw yourself at whoever or whatever is available.

There is no separation for you between clean or dirty or nice or mean or yin and yang or light and dark or high and low—etc; etc; etc. it’s all operating in the same moment, because there is a trinity of time inside of you that consists of past, present and future, which means that as soon as a happy story leaves your mouth, your body automatically counteracts it with a ‘what if’ or a ‘yeah, but’.

Your secrets aren’t secrets, they’re wearable garments, they’re scars in hidden places from glass, and concrete, and wood. They are hard slaps and put downs and rejection.
They are your own revenge in the name of sarcasm, withholding affection and brutal remarks.
They are tossed-aside olds and forgotten feelings, you could write dictionaries trying to describe those feelings.
They are burns that have left faint traces of discolored marks on your skin like chemtrails polluting the sky above. They exist. You make them exist easier by crying the tears of a clown.

There are moments more shameful and slimy than they could ever imagine and you don’t know how to turn that into poetry.

But you’d rather be soft, like the belly of a fish exposed to a knife. Because somewhere in another world, dirty means clean, and sad means happy, and secret means public information and somewhere,

in another world, its okay to carry the unraveling family torments, the drunken stares at the moon, shameful early morning whisky drives trying to reach the end of it all. Because even the screaming, the wailing, the tear pillows, the slammed doors and bruised moments that built prisons in your heart valves,

are worth being worn.

About the author

Didem Caia

Didem is a Turkish Australian writer who grew up in the western suburbs of Melbourne. She is a writer of plays, essays and fiction. Her plays have been produced and developed in Melbourne, Sydney, Edinburgh, London, New York and Chicago. She has received development grants through the Australian Arts Council, Ian Potter Cultural Trust, Copywright Agency, Melbourne City Council and Western Chances Scholarship Program. Her plays Vile, Isolation, Work in Progress and the University of Longing have all been funded through Melbourne funding bodies. Vile was shortlisted for a number of Australian theatre awards and in 2015 was shortlisted for the Theatre 503 New Play award in London. In 2015 she travelled to the UK and US to take part in a number of theatre festivals and showcase her plays. Her essays and fiction have been published through Currency House Press, australianplays.org, Meanjin, Yen magazine, Express Media, Artshub and The Age. Her work draws on her mixed cultural heritage and she fuses personal stories of the working class, womanhood, and home to bring light to the many facets of being Australian. Didem received a Graduate Diploma in Dramatic Art when she was 16 through recognition for prior learning, and is also a graduate of RMIT, NIDA and the VCA.