Dirty Laundry

There is a big problem in my life that I have been ignoring for years. Or, just papering over and pretending to deal with. It’s one of those things that is private and if I chose to never mention it then noone would ever have any clue about it. It is easily hidden and even easy to ignore. Sure, there are a couple of times a day when I am confronted by this issue and am forced to deal with it. But the soon evidence of it is shoved back in a drawer, or hidden under other things. I’ve spent money to try to fix it. I’ve thrown things out, I’ve tried to just live with it, but it never fails to come back and bother me again. I know for certain that I am not alone in dealing with this problem. But I wonder, for those who’ve dealt with this issue successfully, how do they do it? Is it will power, is there some magical solution?

Some of you may have already guessed what I’m talking about. For those of you who haven’t, read on…

Yes, I am talking about mismatched socks. It seems every year I spend a small fortune buying new tube socks, new gym socks, new dress socks, new hiking socks. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Soon enough, the perfectly matched and specially purchased fall into the same old rut – only one sock remains. Who knows where the other one went? I don’t.

There are, of course, those rare pairs that somehow manifest a mystical ability to stay intact for many years, no matter how often they’re worn. For these gifts from the universe, I am greatful, and from them I am given hope.

But for the vast majority of socks, it is inevitable that sooner or later they end up orphaned. A single sock, trying so hard to fit in with other similar but not quite identical socks. Black socks with different patters. White socks with different toe details – yellow, grey, logo’d, blank. Brownish/greenish socks, all desperately searching for their sole-mate, but condemned. Their fates sealed: perhaps they’ll eek out a few bottom-of-the-drawer-no-other-choice mismatched wearings, or they’ll sit their, sometimes for years, unworn, in a desperate but ultimately futile longing for their match. And I, their equally forlorn conspirator. Deluded, pretending, that perhaps, maybe, one day the long-disappeared pair will crawl out from some corner, emerge from hiding, and re-appear through the eternal black hole of sockdom.

But nay. Mismatched socks to not spontaneously re-combobulate.

And as for me, the human manifestation of the orphaned pair — on the one hand I cannot find the internal strength to accept the reality of a lost sock, and on the other hand I abhor the thought of donning two that do not mimic each other in each detail: color, material, thickness, pattern, and logo. And thus I’ve doomed myself to a drawer, and a life, full of unmatched socks.There they sit, unusable. Unwearable. Unbearable.  Yet I’ve not the heart to dispose of them, clinging ever to the stupid, foolish idea that one day I’ll find a pair for at least one of them and for that — a faint and futile hope — I keep them all.