There is a gap beside my dryer where socks go to die. I think I lose atleast one sock everytime I do laundry, and I do laundry at least once a week, so that is at least 52 socks a year (probably). The sheer quantity of socks that have been lost to my dryer gap are so great and deep and dusty that I feel paralyzed in fear to even attempt a rescue mission. I feel that I have to just cut my losses.
So instead, each time I do laundry I am left with a single, pairless sock at the bottom of the basket. Out of shame, I shove it into a drawer with the others and convince myself that their companions must just be in the next load, that they will be reunited before they even realize they were apart.
As you can imagine, this is a tremendous burden.
If soulmates are real, pairs of socks fit this construct better than any. A pairing that is truly made for and lose purpose without one another, a pairing whose existence relies on one another and are cosmically misaligned if they are coupled with anyone else.
Who am I to separate these pairs? To separate these sole-mates, if you will... What other things in my life do I discard without a second thought?
Even with this webpage, I couldn't figure out how to set-up a new one so I panicked and just overwrote my first practice page. It was a worthless, uninteresting, jibberish excuse of a webpage, but a webpage no less. A sock is cheap, dispensable, replaceable, but a sock no less. Socks and websites alike are made up of data and effort and memory, included in our own personal hierarchies of importance. The missing socks, and the webpage before this one, apparently held a low enough position in my hierarchy to be discarded and lost forever.
I would like to remember the things I have discarded, just for a moment.
Hobbies, art, music, games, books, websites, relationships, people, and socks. They are lost but they are real, and there was a reason why I used to hold them.
