I, Washer

There are places that look still, but aren’t.
You watch them and understand the land is holding old gestures,
like cloth someone has folded too many times.
I notice it the moment I step into the water:
the river changes its breathing.

Maps show it differently, of course.
New lines, polygons pushing against each other,
edges that weren’t there the last time someone drew them.
But those are late signals.
The land warns earlier.
I can feel it tighten like damp fabric between my hands,
ready to give if I pull a little more.

Sometimes I walk to the bank and pick up scraps of clothing,
pieces of stories people dropped
when the landscape started getting tired.
I wet them, look at them,
and see it isn’t dirt they carry.
It’s memory.
Memory of repeated use,
constant friction,
pressures that built up without sound.

Scholars call it vulnerability.
I’ve heard the word pass through the mouths
of those who study maps.
Exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity…
they say, as if the land could be explained
with three straight lines.

But for me it’s simpler:
a place responds according to what it has endured.
Exposure feels like a faint tremor in the cloth,
sensitivity is the way the river shifts its depth,
and adaptive capacity…
that’s the part you see in what doesn’t collapse right away.

In cities, I notice things before anyone else.
There are neighborhoods where heat clings like an old stain,
streets without shade,
walls that have swallowed too many summers.
And others where the wind moves freely,
as if the infrastructure had been designed for living
and not against it.

When I wash a cloth found there,
the difference is clear:
some release their weight immediately,
others hold on to it
as if it were part of their body.
Not out of will—
out of neglect.

Sometimes I think that’s what I really wash:
not clothing or fears or stigma,
but the trace inequality leaves on things.
The water recognizes where landscapes hurt.
I just accompany it.

What’s curious is that it’s almost never about the present.
When a cloth trembles between my fingers,
it doesn’t tremble for today,
but for what happened long before.
What was unresolved,
what kept gathering like a wrinkle in the land.

The river knows.
The cloth does too.

I only wash.
And watch how, quietly,
the landscape lets go of what it can no longer carry.