Vertical Drop: Creative Writing Assignment
Everything sits in the sink until it’s time. A dirty dish left to soak for later. Abandoned fragments aspiring to future purpose. Remnants long forgotten of things eaten. Chewed on. Spat out. Smeared, undigested, unloved. Left by others for me to clean.
Piled up, traces of a busy schedule or the lethargy in a new promise of procrastination busting breakthrough. Echoes of sustenance, life-giving crumbs untouched, untasted. Documentation of meals in saturated archival form. Each one of these pieces a memory upon which once sat the embrace of a hot meal at the end of the day. Only through the ritual of cleansing may they return to a state of re-use. An archive in a perpetual state of replacement and renewal. But the higher they pile, the more anxiety-inducing they become. Furthest from the clear mind of the empty sink. It’s always my turn. Finish.
The dishes are attached. In me. On me. Of me. Cleansing them only provides the temporary medicament where I am able to bask in a station arrived rather than a destination reached. The dishes are as much self-portrait as they are co-pilot. Portraits of the stuff of life, but also a spotless reflection from the inside out.
Sometimes they tell anxiety-inducing stories left behind by others. The smears and stains which just won’t wash out. The stubborn traces of corrosive relationships which refuse washing whiter. None of the plates are in order. The dish of grazed knees and playing outside until it got dark sits atop the cup of me letting her go for the last time and knowing it. Knives of estrangement tucked under the forks of aching to be remembered. Houses and homes. Neighborhoods now bulldozed into empty malls. Schools long since shuttered and overgrown, buried under the crushing weight of institutional paperwork and chemical imbalance. Friends always frozen as awkward teenagers, drunk behind a church disco and wrestling with how unforgiving cider can be on a child’s brain. Rubbing alcohol that efficiently cleans even the toughest stains.
Saucers of the greatest nights of my life. Of seeing her for the first time in the bar. Of seeing them for the last time at the gate. Of the violence which often came with changing jobs. Cleaned but never clean. The baked on grease of arguments on birthdays and the plates heaped upon plates of drinking too much too soon. Spotless results every time. Finish.
The ritual is both open cycle and closed wound. The dishes pile up, but there’s a thankful catharsis which comes from telling the truth. The kind of satisfaction which comes from the plates commercially put away, cutlery organized in drawers, effluvia conveniently washed down an ever-welcoming drain to god-knows-where. A dirt that is gone. These are the cleansing rituals of making peace with the dirt of the past and embracing it for what it is. Tough on stains, gentle on hands.
Where the smears of others no longer leave stains on you. The time he hit you. The time you dared to hit him back with a squeaky-clean long-lasting formula which promised to teach him the domestic lesson of his life. The public moments of intense self-care which led you to walk away when it all got too much, even though that wasn’t what happened. The dishes of recovery. The dishes of the spotless all-clear and the recuperation which only comes from being the other side of cancer. Not the paper plates of patient. The ceramic plates of survival. I’m still here, and I’m doing the washing up.
These are the dishes of being unaffected. The fresh scent of finally realizing you are not your job. The residue-freedom of sleeping peacefully. The dishes of breakfast at seven, lunch at eleven, dinner at four and bed at nine. The wonderful detergent of hearing other people but not listening. The comforting dirt which comes from doing your own thing. Finish.
A peaceful formula washes over the kitchen chaos. I can’t control it, but I can accept it. Anxiety as a means to come to terms with a past which doesn’t try to banish tough stains. Some plates have been in the sink for years, grown immune to soap. Some get wiped and set aside to drain. Dig deeper into the bottom of the pile. Draw out some of those older dishes. Youthful meals now turned to crusted mold.
These are the stories which always take the longest to clean, but often are the briefest to dispatch to a pristine shine. The ones which just seem to hang around like a foaming barnacle on the effortless bleached hull of memories. These are the ones I tell my daughter. These plates are the ones with the sharpest of memories. The ones that’ll cut you in the hot oily water. The dishes which are at the bottom of the pile for a reason. Finish.
Some dishes I’ll never touch. They live in the sink, but are not of me. A place to be able to recall each dish, clean or not. Second, third, fourth generation concentrated cleans. A place of recollection but not a place of catharsis rinsed away. Not a place to neatly arrange the dishes as they soak, but a place to put the dishes aside. Only in the future does it become a means unto itself. Streak-free. But these are futures which never come. Meals never resolved.
These are the meals of the heart. The dishes which simply drifted away but which I can still see. I can effortlessly taste them, but I can’t touch them. These are the meals of loss. Of ache. The bitter dishes which always make it impossible to empty the sink with superior fast-acting convenience. There are always those which just need more time to soak. To come back to when the time is right. But it never is. The dishes of homes left and friends long gone. Plates of goodbyes which neither of knew we were already in the middle of. There’s no haven of cleanliness here. The varied courses of intense friendship which burn twice as bright but half as long. A dirty which says… I cleaned. Finish.
