WHEN I THINK ABOUT love, I am picking up your socks. This is not the only pair that I’ve found. They are here, on the stairs, and there behind the chair. There’s a pair stuffed in your boots. I trace a smell to a purple pair, inside out, and there’s a hole, in the sole, so I throw those ones away. I find a sock in the washing that has no other, and it’s this one I think about. It must’ve been part of a pair: you or I will have bought a pair of socks to wear as a pair. So where did it go?
I emptied the sock drawer in case the odd sock was there. But there was no one sock. Just pairs. Twelve years of our socks, actually. Socks we wore here and took there. Black socks. Striped socks. Ankle socks and tights (those are mine, at least, I hope they are mine).
I realise that we wear each other’s socks now. We no longer care for which are yours and which are mine. We share everything else. And now even our socks. My left to your right. My right is your left. But we no longer need those sorts of directions. Socks are always one and the same. And yours are more comfortable anyway.
Then a little voice asks for her socks—‘A blue one,’ she says. ‘And an orange one. Just like Daddy.’ And she’s putting on a sock of yours over one of hers, though perhaps it’s one of mine. No. It’s one of ours, and it’s definitely the one I thought we couldn’t find. It’s far too big for her, but we let her wear it, pulled right up above her knee. It makes us laugh. She laughs too.
‘We’re a three-sock family,’ she says.
And I realise that’s what odd socks are for. When a pair becomes three. None of this yours and mine. But our sock drawer.