The Clothes We Leave Behind

The Clothes We Leave Behind

By: C.J. Riley

The laundromat closed at eleven.

Eli waited until 11:30. He'd been sitting across the street beneath the broken awning of the closed pharmacy, watching the neon sign in the laundromat window flicker between OPEN and nothing.

At 11:16, the sign went dark.

At 11:20, Eli crossed the street.

The lock on the side door was older than he was. That was the first thing he'd noticed three nights earlier when he'd walked past and seen the owner struggling with a key ring after closing.

The second thing he'd noticed was the loose window beside it.

The third was the clothing. Rows of forgotten clothes hung along the back wall. Thrift-store donations. Abandoned laundry. Clothes people had forgotten in dryers and never returned for.

Jackets, shirts, jeans, dresses, uniforms. Things that had belonged to people but were needlessly discarded instead of given to those in need.

Eli needed a jacket. Not just any jacket, a decent one. The kind that didn't have a rip beneath the left pocket and didn't smell faintly like his father's cigarettes.

Tomorrow night was the winter formal. He had told Maya he wasn't going. She had looked at him for three seconds and said, "Sure." In a drawn-out, sarcastic tone.

His mother had offered to buy him something. It was a loving gesture, but he knew better. They didn't have money for a jacket, so he returned the loving lie with another: he declined the offer, saying he didn’t need one. Besides, accepting help from his mother meant admitting he was still a boy and needed it.

Eli would rather steal one.

The side window lifted with barely a sound. Just small enough to fit, he slipped inside.

The laundromat smelled different after closing.

During the day it smelled like detergent, hot metal, and just a hint of privilege.

At night, it smelled like nothing.

The machines sat in rows beneath the fluorescent lights, their round doors reflecting him back in dozens of warped versions.

Eli pulled the window shut behind him. "Easy." His voice echoed in the laundromat's odd vastness.

He stood still. Nothing happened. No alarms, no people. He smiled.

"See? “He whispered it to himself. “Nothing happened.”

He walked toward the clothes. About fifty garments hung from a long metal rack near the back.

He ran his fingers across them.

A denim jacket, too small.

A gray hoodie, too plain.

A black leather jacket! Perfect.

Eli pulled it from the rack. The moment the fabric touched his shoulders, he stopped breathing.

In a flash, the laundromat disappeared!

****

He was forty-eight years old. His name was Daniel. He was standing in a hospital hallway as crying echoed through the corridor.

No… He was crying. Eli tried to move, but his body didn't respond.

His hands were older, thicker, with a wedding ring around his finger.

A doctor was speaking. "Mrs. Carter didn't make it through the night."

Daniel nodded. He understood. His wife was dead.

The realization didn't arrive like Eli expected. A complete recollection and comprehension.

A lifetime of knowing her. Her laugh, the way she hummed while washing dishes. The ridiculous argument they had about painting the kitchen yellow. Their first apartment. Their first Christmas. The birth of their daughter. Thirty-one years… Gone.

Eli felt Daniel's grief as though it belonged to him. It didn't feel like watching someone else cry.

It felt like losing the person he'd loved most in the world. He screamed with a pain that seemed to echo through time…

The hospital hallway vanished in another flash.

Eli crashed onto the laundromat floor, his fall broken by a scattered section of boxes. The jacket fell beside him.

He scrambled backward.

His chest hurt.

He looked at his hands.

Sixteen, I’m still sixteen.

The leather jacket lay on the floor.

He stared at it. "NO WAY!" He didn't dare touch it, not for several seconds.

Then curiosity defeated fear.

He reached for the sleeve.

Nothing.

He pulled it on.

Nothing.

Eli laughed nervously.

"Okay."

He took it off. The world had stayed where it belonged.

He looked toward the rack. "That was weird."

An inkling that he should have left passed swiftly, and instead, he picked up a red sweater.

****

She was eight years old. Her name was Nora. She was sitting beneath a Christmas tree.

Her father was wrapping presents on the couch.

He kept looking toward the kitchen.

Her mother was crying in there, and Nora knew why.

Dad had lost his job, Mom had lost her patience, and Nora had lost something too. She just didn't know what. She watched her father wrap a small box.

He smiled when he looked at it. "Don't tell your mother," he said.

Nora felt happy. The feeling was so pure it hurt.

Then the memory changed.

She was seventeen in the same house.

Her father wasn't there.

She was holding a letter he had left.

Not because he didn't love them. Because he thought they would be better without him.

Nora hated him for it, then she missed him, then she hated him again.

Eli felt all of it…

Love,

Anger,

Shame,

Forgiveness,

He ripped the sweater off.

He stumbled backward.

The laundromat was dark around him; his eyes had adjusted, but the fluorescent lights seemed dimmer.

He checked his phone: 12:03. Only forty-six minutes had passed.

He felt as though he'd lived twenty years. The thought of leaving grew stronger, but instead he looked at the clothes.

“There is something wrong with them.”

“Or something right, maybe?”

He couldn't decide.

Each one carried something. A life, or at least a piece of one.

He reached for a blue work shirt.

He was a mechanic. His name was Luis. His hands were dirty, and his daughter was calling, so he didn't answer.

He was angry. She had dropped out of college and wanted to become a photographer.

He thought it was foolish. He wanted her to have security. He wanted her to have what he never had. He wanted her to understand that love wasn't enough to pay rent.

The phone rang again.

Luis stared at it… Then declined the call.

The memory shifted.

Two years later.

His daughter stood beside his hospital bed. She was crying. "You never came to my gallery."

Luis wanted to speak, but he couldn't. The oxygen mask covered his mouth.

She held his hand. "I kept waiting."

Eli felt something inside Luis collapse. Not his body, Something deeper.

The knowledge that sometimes you could love someone so much that you accidentally taught them they weren't loved.

The shirt fell from Eli's hands.

He backed away.

"No." His voice shook. "No, no, no."

He looked at the rack. It had changed. There were more clothes now, or maybe there had always been more; he couldn't remember.

At 1:10, Eli stopped choosing clothes.

The clothes began choosing him.

A yellow raincoat, a nurse walking through a flooded neighborhood after a hurricane.

A white dress, a woman standing alone in a church bathroom on her wedding day, wondering whether she could still walk away.

A child's dinosaur pajamas, a boy hiding beneath his bed while his parents screamed downstairs.

A navy uniform, a sailor writing a letter he would never send.

A green cardigan, an elderly woman sitting beside a window, holding a photograph of a man she'd buried fifty years earlier.

Every garment was a door; Eli had only to open it, and every time he did, someone else's life flooded through him.

Some were beautiful, some were unbearable, but most were ordinary.

That was what frightened him; the world wasn't made of heroes and villains. It was made of people. People who missed calls, people who stayed too long, people who left too soon, people who said the wrong thing because they were afraid, people who loved each other and still managed to hurt each other, people who were lonely in crowded rooms, and people who were happy for reasons nobody else understood.

At 2:04, Eli put on a brown coat.

****

He became a man named Thomas. Thomas was sixty-three. He sat in a diner, and across from him sat a woman. She was smiling.

Eli recognized her, not personally, from the first jacket.

Daniel's wife!?

No, not her; it was her daughter. Older now.

Thomas reached across the table. The woman took his hand.

"I don't think Dad ever forgave himself," she said.

Thomas squeezed her fingers. "Maybe he didn't need to."

Eli watched them.

They weren't lovers. They weren't strangers. They were two people who had lost someone and found each other afterward.

Thomas had met her at a grief group. They had become friends. Nothing more. Maybe something more someday.

The memory ended with the woman laughing.

Eli smiled. For the first time that night, he wasn't afraid. He understood.

The clothes weren't showing him death. They were showing him connection.

Every person left something behind. A feeling, a decision, a memory, a piece of themselves woven into something ordinary. A jacket, a shirt, a dress, a pair of jeans. The things people wore while simply living.

He looked at the rack and suddenly felt ashamed. He had come here because he wanted a jacket. Something that belonged to someone else. Something he could take without asking.

He thought about Daniel, about Nora, about Luis. He thought about the woman in the church, about the boy under the bed. He thought about how easily he had decided other people's things were simply things.

He picked up the black leather jacket. He almost put it on, then stopped.

"No."

He hung it back.

For the first time since entering the laundromat, Eli wanted to leave. He walked toward the side window.

It wouldn't open.

He pulled harder.

Nothing.

He checked the door.

Locked.

He ran to the front.

Locked.

"Come on." He tried the handle again.

Nothing.

His heart began pounding as he looked at the clock.

4:31.

The laundromat had become colder. The machines were silent, but the clothes moved. Not much. Just enough to look unnatural.

Sleeves shifted, a dress swayed, a shirt turned slowly on its hanger.

Eli backed away. "I said I'm leaving!"

A voice came from somewhere behind him. Not a real voice. A memory. His mother's.

You don't have to prove everything by doing it alone.

Eli froze… Another voice.

His father's.

You think asking for help makes you weak?

He turned but saw nothing.

Then he heard Maya, but not really Maya.

Something he'd heard her say weeks ago.

"You always act like you don't care."

Eli swallowed. He understood suddenly. He had spent the entire night wearing other people's lives because he didn't know what to do with his own.

He had wanted a jacket because he wanted to become someone else for one night. Someone who had money, someone confident, someone who belonged. But belonging couldn't be stolen off a hanger.

The first light of dawn appeared through the windows.

The clothes stopped moving. The fluorescent lights flickered, once, twice.

The side door clicked… Unlocked.

Eli stared at it, then at the clothes.

He walked back to the rack. The black leather jacket was still there.

He touched it.

Nothing happened.

He smiled.

"Thank you."

He didn't know who he was thanking.

Maybe all of them.

Maybe himself.

He slipped through the window as the padlock on the door was still in place.

The sky was turning gray.

He stood across the street as the laundromat's sign flickered back to life.

OPEN.

A car pulled into the parking lot.

An old woman stepped out carrying a laundry basket.

She looked toward him.

"You all right, honey?"

Eli almost said yes.

Instead, he looked down at himself. He was still wearing his father's old garage jacket. The rip beneath the pocket was still there. It smelled like oil and nicotine. It was ugly. It was warm, and it was his.

"I'm okay," he said.

The woman smiled. "Good." She answered as she went inside.

Eli started walking home. He had no jacket for the dance and no money for one. There was no miracle waiting in his bedroom, but halfway down the block, he stopped.

He pulled out his phone. His mother had texted him,

I left some money on the counter. I know you said you didn't need anything. You don't have to spend it. But if you want the jacket, get the jacket.

Eli stared at the message, then another appeared.

And Eli? You don't have to be somebody else for Maya.

He laughed, then he started crying. He wasn’t feeling Daniel's grief, Luis's regret, or Nora's anger.

He felt his own. For once, it was his own.

He typed:

Thanks, Mom.

Then he hesitated.

Added:

I love you.

He pressed send.

The sun blinded him a bit as it broke over the rooftops.

Behind him, inside the laundromat, the old woman loaded a washing machine. She looked toward the rack of forgotten clothes. For just a moment, she thought she saw the black leather jacket move.

She smiled. Then she turned away.

The machines began to spin, and whatever magic lived in the clothes returned to sleep. Waiting for the next person who thought they knew what someone else's life was worth.

Eli walked home in his father's old jacket. He didn't feel embarrassed anymore.

It wasn't much, but it had belonged to someone who had worked hard. Someone who had made mistakes. Someone who had loved him, and for the first time, Eli understood that sometimes the clothes we wear aren't meant to make us someone else.

They're meant to remind us who we already are.

The End.