air your dirty laundry- a short story by ali russo

The stillness of the early morning is almost startling to her.

She is never up at this hour; she is usually sleeping in until noon, finding comfort under her covers and hazy dreams, and waking up in a peaceful, tranquil, state of bliss. Her body clock is adjusted to her crazy life, her crazy schedule; she looks forward to sleep, for it is the only sane, normal balance she believes she has in her life.

Stability. That is the name of the game, the word she tries so earnestly to accept, but could never quite get both arms wrapped around it. She needs some sort of constant in her life, some sort of home base where she knows she can always rebound to.

These thoughts flutter to the front of her mind as she wakes up from her sleepy daze, and with one lazy eyes she sees the sun peeking gently through the bottom portion of her blinds and dancing on the edge of her bed, a brilliant, orange-gold color lighting the dark shade of green that is her comforter. She feels her blankets are out of place, untucked from underneath her mattress, and her toes are naked and sticking out from underneath her sheet beneath her comforter.

There is a truly a breath-taking moment in the earliness of the morning; that moment where you do not know where, exactly, you are in society, where you could be anybody, where you could do anything, from ruling the world to ruling your office cubicle. Some people claim it folklore, but the moment does exist, and it does happen every morning. The trick, though, is to catch your mind in it's dreary state, where it is floating still between the two worlds of a dozy dream and an indistinct reality, and think of everything that makes you happy.

She never believes in this when people tell her, but this morning, she tries it, before she continues her ritual of sitting up in her bed, looking around the barren, open room with its dusty wooden floors and empty bookcases, cardboard boxes and packing tape. She thinks of happiness, and lets the emotion capture her, before reality overcomes her body and takes over. It scares her that this is the happiest she has been in this entire chapter of her new life.

The first thing she thinks of is the smell of his skin. How his mild cologne hugged his clothing, and how whenever she wrapped herself in his arms it was all she could smell. He used to try and cover her eyes, his big, athletic hands and thick fingers gently resting over her eyelids; she could feel her eyelashes blinking against his palms as she looked into them. Yet, even with her eyes covered and embraced in a foreign darkness, she could always tell it was him by the scent of his body, the warmth of his breath on the nape of her neck.

Her thoughts shift to another thing that makes her happy: his touch. He was so big compared to her, a giant athlete's build to her petite frame. His touch was so gentle against her skin, so cautious, as if holding her any tighter would crush her and she would shatter like a delicate figurine dropped onto a concrete floor. But she was like silk in his arms, under his touch; she didn't shatter, she melted.

At the thought of his emerald green eyes, she wakes up fully, and the feeling of utter ecstasy is gone.

She sits up; the light still plays on her bed, but it is more broad now with the passage of time. She sighs, running a hand through her long, wavy russet hair, and her gunmetal blue eyes catch onto her phone. It is blinking at her fervently, letting her know that she is loved, she is needed, she is wanted. This is the dream, she tells herself every day, isn't it?

Instead of checking her emails, her voicemails, her Facebook, anything that links her with the vast and engulfing electronic world, she powers down her phone and lets her feet dangle from the edge of her bed, a soft thud hitting against the wood when she stands. She pulls the blinds of her windows and stands in front of them, the breathtakingly beautful view of the city staring her in the eye, as if to say, "Aren't I lovely? Look at me, I'm here for you."

She stands in front of her window, her arms hugging herself. Today is her day off, she has this grand, enormous city surrounding her with plenty of opportunities to do something. Anything. "Just get me out of here," she mumbles to herself, with a sigh. Suddenly, though, a magnificent, glorious occurrence pops into her still-sleepy head: she needs clean clothing.

Taking her messy, dirty pile of laundry she has flung in the corner for the past week while she has been moving, she lazily balls it all together and throws it all into a plastic bag near her box containing her kitchenware; there is not a lot of clothing. Slipping on an oversized sweatshirt and her winter boots, she grabs her keys and some quarters, beginning her voyage to the local laundromat down the street.

She steps out of her apartment and into a warm spring day, where the snow is melting and the slush is filing into the drain-pipes; vibrant crocuses, emerging for the first time all year, are peering through the half-frozen, half-dampened soil. The plastic bag is in her right hand, her left hand is buried in her pocket, holding onto the loose change. She cannot help but look up at the sky; a brilliant azure today, the clouds like little cotton-ball tufts. She remembers from her childhood, then, playing with the cotton-balls she had in her house; she always saw them as something magical, something that was not only fun to play with, but was also something that could take the boo-boos away on her scraped knees after a long, hard days of play. Her mother was a nurse, and she never had the heart to tell her daughter anything else if it made her happy.

With her head literally in the clouds, she feels something press up against her torso, and before she can even register what is happening, she is falling backwards, gravity taking control of her. She lands on her back, winded, feeling her throat close up. She hears herself gasping for air, and someone's voice, a man, apologizing. When her world stops spinning she sees a hand, outstretched and right in front of her nose. With a weary cautiousness, she grabs it, and slowly, the stranger pulls her back to her feet. He looks her in the eye, and she quickly examines his face: he is of normal physique, with short, auburn hair and a square jaw with a small cleft in his chin. He has twinkling green eyes, and he looks about her age. Subconsciously, she commends his bravery for blatantly wearing a Red Sox shirt in the middle of New York. He is smiling, and about to open his mouth to speak when his eye catches onto something, and he says sympathetically, "Oh, your clothing,"

She feels heat flush her face as she turns around to see her laundry everywhere. She bends down to pick it up, and he squats down beside her, picking up her articles of clothing. Out of her peripheral vision she sees him stop, and she turns to face him. He is holding her Victoria's Secret underwear, the hot-pink lacy one that she wears whenever she needs a boost of confidence. She plucks it from his fingers and says to him lightly, "Relax, it's not going to attack you," and his baritone laugh echoes through her ears.

This is the first memory she thinks of as she looks down at him now. Those green eyes never stopped twinkling, those fingers never stopped healing her broken heart, that laugh never stopped being her favorite sound. He is solidly on one knee, the same smile she fell for that day on his face as he speaks her full name aloud, a velvet box protecting a perfect object, a wonderful question wrapped around it.

"Yes," she whispers aloud, as she stands in the middle of the street at the exact place she had bumped into him five years before. "Yes, with all of my heart, yes."