R’s Closet

You often don’t tidy up until you invite guests over to your house. And no one but me has gone into your walk-in closet in the last few years. Spring, summer, autumn, winter, year after year the clothing from your childhood and teenage years just kept getting hidden toward the back. Season after season you just superficially folded the visible part, with the clothes you wear every day, the essentials that occupy the small illuminated part of the room. Because, after all, you are the only one who goes in there. Until someone, me for example, tries to enter with a torch after seeing that you have holes in your socks, and searching for pajamas finds bras in the underwear drawer. The bras have a hook that pulls out some stockings with a run, curled up inside a jumper your gran knitted for you. The jumper has a button that you liked to touch, and it reminded you of the boy you used to play football with (wrinkled up, it’s a nest for dust bunnies). And from inside the sleeve comes a balled-up black sock that was your father’s—he was so obsessed with insisting you be punctual, and finish school—and further back, those pajamas, the Mickey Mouse ones they bought you when you all went to Disneyland together the summer right before the separation. All the way at the back, on the upper part of the last shelf, the bedspread with colorful edging that was always on your bed at your mother’s house takes up a lot of space.

“Kid, organize your closet.”