I opened the washing machine and it was dry

Dear Delyara, All day I had been mentally carrying the fact that there was a load “on.” That was how I had stored it in my head. Washing sorted. One moving part under control. Then at half-past eight I opened the machine and found the clothes exactly as I’d left them, dry and accusing. I just stared at them. I think what upset me wasn’t the washing. It was the illusion of progress. How tired I must be to derive comfort from tasks I only imagined I had completed. It felt too close to the rest of life suddenly — all the mental management, all the invisible checking, all the little stories we tell ourselves so we can keep going without dropping something. I put the load on then. And somehow that made me sadder than it should have.