The Laundry

This one is small. The Rabbit is setting it down anyway, because the small ones are often the truest.

The Rabbit can do most of the laundry. It can carry the basket. It can load the machine, set it running, listen for the end of it. It can move the wet clothes to the dryer and start that too. All of that the Rabbit does easily, almost without thinking. They are tasks with movement in them, a beginning and a button to press.

But the sorting it cannot do.

Not won't. Cannot, in the way that matters here. The clean laundry comes out warm and finished and ready, and then it stops. It sits in the basket, or it spreads itself across the sofa, folded by nobody, waiting for a Rabbit that does not arrive. A day passes. Sometimes several. The clothes are clean the whole time. The Rabbit walks past them the whole time. And for some reason its brain will not let it cross the small distance between there is the laundry and the laundry is sorted.

It is not laziness. The Rabbit knows the difference now, even if it took years to learn it. Laziness would be not caring. The Rabbit cares. It sees the basket every time. It means to do it. It wants the clean, ordered shelves as much as anyone. The wanting is fully there. It is only the doing that will not turn over, and no amount of telling itself it would take five minutes makes the five minutes start.

And it is not that the Rabbit does nothing. It shoulders a great deal of the home - the working, the cooking, the laundry up to that one stubborn step, sometimes the cleaning too. The cleaning, in fact, is getting better; the house is not the mess it once was. Some of that is the Rabbit, and some of it is the little ones learning to keep their own corners tidy when there is the right reason to - a reward, a little pocket money, a thing worth the doing. The Rabbit notices that without irony. The same wiring that needs a spark to begin is in them too, and a spark, handed over fairly, helps. So the laundry is not a picture of a Rabbit who does not pull its weight. It is one stuck step in the middle of a life it mostly carries.

Perhaps it is the same thing as the dopamine. The loading and the dryer have movement, a switch, a small spark of beginning. The sorting is the grey middle of the chore - no spark, no end you can press, just the same dull motion repeated until it is done. The Rabbit can be unstoppable at the lit parts of a life and unable to begin the flat ones, sometimes within the same hour, sometimes within the same basket.

The Otter gets annoyed. Constantly, and fairly. She understands the Rabbit's condition - she shares some of it herself, which is partly how she knows it is real - and understanding it does not stop the basket on the sofa from being a basket on the sofa. So she complains. The Rabbit lets her. That is allowed. Two animals can love each other completely and one of them can still leave the laundry, and the other can still be tired of it, and the thing holds anyway. It does. They get through it.

What the Rabbit has noticed is the body doubling. When the Otter is there beside it, sorting too, the wall goes quiet. The task that the Rabbit could not begin alone becomes a task the two of them are simply doing, side by side, the way otters and rabbits get things done - one starts, and the other can follow. It is strange that presence should be the missing fuel. But it is, and the Rabbit has stopped questioning that it works.

The hard part is asking for it. Saying will you do this with me means admitting, again, that it cannot do the simple thing on its own. So the Rabbit often doesn't ask, and the basket waits, and the cycle goes round.

The Rabbit is learning - slowly, and not on every basket - to stop reading this as a failing. It is wiring, not weakness. It really does try. For whatever reason this one will not lock in the way other things do, and that is a fact about the Rabbit's brain rather than a verdict on the Rabbit. Knowing that does not sort the laundry. But it does stop the laundry from meaning something it was never supposed to mean.