Lilly Soos

Un-washed

     Laundry has a way of becoming part of the air in a room.

     Not just the smell, though that was there too, sharp and sour, clinging to the corners of the walls but the feeling of it. Clothes slumped over the edges of two overflowing baskets like bodies that had given up. Shirts that hadn’t been worn in weeks. Socks that had lost their matches. Jeans stiff from being worn too many times without a wash. The kind of laundry that stops being “laundry” and starts becoming a presence. A reminder. A weight.

     It lived in a room that barely felt like mine. A room where the curtains stayed drawn because the sunlight only made the mess look louder. A room that was only cleaned when someone else asked, and usually with a half-hearted sweep of guilt pushing me to do it. A room where the bed was never made, where the sheets smelled tired and used and overdue for the wash that never came. A room where dishes built themselves into a second skyline on my dresser. A room with food scraps in the trash that gnats worshiped like it was their altar.

     Even from the hallway, you could look in and see the tiny black dots orbiting the ceiling like constellations of everything I avoided.

     It was a Saturday.

     Saturday meant Dad was at work and had typically asked one thing of me: the laundry.

     Just one chore. One small, simple task. One load. He didn’t ask for the room, or the dishes, or the trash. Just the laundry. The easiest, quickest, most manageable of everything I had let rot around me.

     And I still couldn’t do it.

     I told myself I would, though.

     “I’ll do it later,” I said out loud to no one. Laundry doesn’t take long. I had time. I could put it in, then watch TV while it washed, then be done before he ever came home.

     It sounded reasonable. It sounded possible. 

     But my body didn’t move.

     Instead, I laid there under the weight of everything un-done. Laundry, dishes, life, and let Netflix autoplay me through cheesy rom-coms that required nothing from me except existing.

     Then my grandma Gigi came in.

     “Lilly,” she said gently, her voice soft even when she was trying to nudge me into something. “I know you don’t want to do your laundry, but it’s one o’clock. Your dad will be home in four hours. The dryer takes at least an hour. I’d do it for you, but my fibromyalgia and my vertigo are really acting up today. I love you. I just don’t want you to get yelled at.”

     I nodded. Told her “Okay, thank you.” 

     And meant it.

     But the second she stepped out, I rolled back over and felt that ache in my chest, the familiar one, the one shaped like failure.

     Why couldn’t I move? 

     Why couldn’t I just get up?

     Why couldn’t I do the bare minimum?

     I had forty-five minutes to spare. Forty-five minutes where I could have had the laundry running while I escaped into another dumb movie. But instead, my legs felt glued to the mattress, my thoughts heavy and thick, every part of my body sluggish like it was moving through mud.

     Thirty minutes passed.

     Rom-coms passed.

     Gigi’s worry passed through the walls and settled into me like guilt. 

     Then Aunt Meghan walked in.

     “Lilly,” she said, tired but worried, “what chores did your dad ask you to do? I don’t want you to get screamed at. If there are any, just do them.”

     She set a sandwich on my side table, sighed, and left.

     I stared at the sandwich, suddenly nauseous.

     I wanted to scream for help, beg someone to drag me out of bed, or sit with me, or tell me I wasn’t crazy or lazy or broken.

     But nothing came out.

     I was mute.

     Voiceless.

     Like someone had pressed the mute button on my whole existence.

     My chest tightened.

     My throat closed.

     Panic wrapped around me like a weighted blanket from hell. 

     My heartbeat thudded loud enough to shake me.

     And then at some point, I fell asleep.

     Curled up in the middle of my dirty sheets, surrounded by laundry that smelled like stale sweat and guilt.

     I only woke up because of the front door.

     I heard it slam shut, heavy, final, unmistakable. 

     My heart dropped straight to my feet.

     I knew that sound.

     I knew the rhythm of the footsteps that followed, slow, dense steps with a pause between each one, the kind that came from an exhausted man after a long day of work.

     Dad.

     I have never moved so fast in my life.

     I grabbed the nearest basket of laundry, practically tripping over myself as I stumbled out of the room and down the hallway toward the stairs. If I could just get it started, if I could just get it in the washer, maybe I could lie and say it had been running.

     But the stairs gave me away.

     They were old, creaky, carpeted stairs that announced every step you took. There was no sneaking, no slipping past, no pretending.

     The basement had always smelled like its own version of exhaustion. A mix of cement, dust, and the faint scent of whatever uncle Brad had cooked last week. My dad’s “room” was behind a curtain, separated from the rest of the basement by a thin sheet of fabric that did nothing to stop smells, sounds, or tension.

     I reached the bottom step just as he stepped out of that curtain, already changed out of his penguin-shit-covered work clothes.

     And everything stopped.

     My breath.

     My thoughts.

     Time itself.

     His face shifted from neutral to disappointment so slowly it felt like a knife sliding in.

     He didn't yell.

     Not yet.

     He just stared.

     And that stare alone crushed me.

     In that silence, I heard everything else:

     The ticking clock on the wall.

     The Kelly Clarkson Show blaring upstairs for the millionth time. 

     Gigi’s voice drifted from outside saying she was going out for a smoke. 

     My own heartbeat is slamming against my ribs.

     Everything except the one voice I desperately needed to hear. 

     Dad finally spoke.

     “So, Lilly,” he said. “What did you do today?”

     I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

     It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I did, it was that I couldn’t explain why I did nothing.

     He waited.

     I panicked.

     “I… don’t know,” I whispered.

     His face twisted.

     “You don’t know what you did today? How does that make sense?"

     And that was it.

     The tears came fast, hot, uncontrollable. 

     Panic trembled up my spine.

     Every part of me felt too small to hold the emotions I had swallowed for weeks, months, maybe years.

     I was drowning and no one even saw the water.

     To everyone else, I was dramatic. 

     Too emotional.

     Too sensitive.

     Too young to be overwhelmed. 

     Too young to be depressed.

     Too young to be tired.

     But I felt ancient at that moment. 

     Worn down.

     Used up.

     I couldn’t speak, couldn’t defend myself, couldn’t say the truth:

     I wanted help. I needed help. I didn’t know how to ask.

     I was grounded.

     Sent to the room I sat in all day. Tired, upset, disappointed. 

     And then the yelling started down in the basement.

     The whole house shook with it.

     When I went upstairs after everything with the laundry, the house felt like it was holding its breath. I'm by myself in my grimy room, still crying, still trying to swallow that heavy mix of guilt and shame. I could hear muffled voices through the vents, Aunt Meghan trying to talk to my dad, my dad already overwhelmed and ready to snap, both of them carrying their own stress like it was stacked on their backs.

     The yelling came fast. I didn’t see the argument start, but I heard it build. Sharp words, louder voices, anger hitting anger. Then it turned into something else. A crash. A thud. Footsteps. My uncle Jim shouting. I didn’t know what happened until later, but I knew it wasn’t good. Gigi had called the police.

     He came upstairs, still furious and exhausted, but quiet in that way that makes your stomach sink. He didn’t yell. He didn’t explain. He just said, “Pack a bag. We’re leaving.”

     But my dad and I were already gone.

     That was it. No time to think, no time to understand. I grabbed whatever clothes I could, too few, not enough to get through more than a couple of days without repeating outfits. I didn’t even take things that made sense. Just clothes. My toothbrush. And a hairbrush.

     We got in the car and left before the police ever showed up.

     We drove to Mount Carmel Brewery to talk to Brad. Or, really, my dad talked, I waited in the car with the windows cracked, breathing in the cold October air and wishing I was anywhere else. I had no phone, no distractions. Just my thoughts circling around everything that had happened and everything I knew was coming next.

     Brad came out with my dad, and then we dropped him back off so he could pack a bag too. Brad grabbed some things from home. After that, we went searching for someplace cheap and open. That’s how we ended up at the Day’s Inn.

     The place smelled like cigarettes, old carpeting, and regret. The kind of smell that sticks to your clothes even after you leave. The room was outdated and dim, floral patterns from the nineties plastered everywhere. The curtains, the bedspreads, even the carpet. The walls felt thin. The air felt heavy.

     But my dad?

     He slept like nothing had happened. 

     Deep, steady, unbothered sleep.

     Meanwhile, Brad came in late after his shift almost every night, shaking a bag of crunchy nacho chips, microwaving food, chewing loudly. The Great Dane, Roxanne, kicked in her sleep and snored like a grown man. The room was small, loud, cramped, and somehow my dad slept through every single noise like it was normal.

     I lay awake most nights, staring at the glow from the TV, listening to the highway outside. We stayed at the Day’s Inn for four days and three nights before moving to the Best Western Clermont, which felt like a miracle in comparison. Cleaner, brighter, room service even if they were out of ketchup the night I ordered fries. But it was still a hotel. It still wasn’t home.

     School during all this felt like I was pretending to live a normal life. I kept wearing the same few outfits. The ones I shoved into the bag when my dad told me to pack. People noticed. The same girls who always whispered found new things to whisper about.

     “Didn’t she wear that last week?” 

     “Does she not have other clothes?” 

     They weren’t quiet.

     Teachers noticed too. Not in a dramatic way, but in the way their eyes softened when they looked at me, like they sensed something off. They didn’t ask, but they saw.

     That’s when my insecurities got heavier.

     I compared myself to every girl in the hallway. Their bodies, their clothes, their confidence. I didn’t look like them. I didn’t feel like them. I wasn’t sure how I felt about myself at all. 

     Sometimes I caught myself feeling things I didn’t know how to explain yet and shoved those feelings away because I didn’t have space for more confusion.

     One night, after school, after pretending everything was fine all day, I got into the shower at the hotel and finally broke. The hot water hit my shoulders and it was like everything I’d been holding in finally cracked open. I cried quietly because I didn’t want my dad or Brad to hear. It wasn’t even about one thing, it was about everything.

     The clothes.

     The fight.

     The hotels.

     The girls at school.

     The way I felt in my own body. 

     The not-knowing.

     The pretending.

     The shower was the only place I could fall apart without someone telling me to stop.

     Those weeks in the hotels blurred together, loud nights, quiet worries, long school days, and that constant feeling of being somewhere between falling apart and holding myself together.

     After weeks of hotels, it felt unreal when we finally moved into the new rental house. Dad, Brad, Gigi, and me. It was beautiful in that way a place looks beautiful when you’re desperate for stability. Fresh paint. Big windows. A yard. Space. And I got the entire basement to myself, which felt like winning something for once.

     At first, I really believed this was the beginning of calm.

     My basement room was big, with metal poles holding up the ceiling and wooden stairs leading down from the kitchen. The air always had a slight chill to it, the kind that seeped into your sleeves and made you pull your blankets tighter. I wore socks all the time, thick, thin, patterned, fuzzy, it didn’t matter. I love socks. But even socks couldn’t keep the cold from getting into my bones down there.

     But the calm didn’t last. A pipe burst and the basement flooded. It wasn’t just a little leak. Water came fast and dirty, the kind of gross basement water that smells like mildew and old mud. The flood ruined my mattress and a lot of my furniture. My dresser swelled, the wood warped, and anything soft was soaked through. My rug, one of the few things that had made the room feel mine, was soaked with that gross water. We pulled it out into the warm spring air and left it there to dry because it was covered in filth from the flood. It sat outside for days, soaking up heat and sun, but it would never really be the same.

     For weeks after, I didn’t have a proper bed. I slept on an air mattress in the living room while everything was sorted out. Most nights the air mattress deflated and I woke up on the floor. My back hurts. The cold seeped into me despite the socks I loved wearing. Dad started putting on The Goldbergs before bed like it was a ritual. Which didn’t make any sense, we never watched it before. When it got cold again, the mice came around. They would scratch in the walls and wake me at night.

     Later on, when my depression got worse, I started leaving dishes in my room sometimes, and one time I opened my door to find a mouse licking dried sauce off a forgotten plate. That image, a mouse at a plate I once ate from. It made me feel even filthier inside than the house had already made me feel outside.

     School kept happening. I kept showing up, shaky from lack of deep sleep, dragging the same tired outfits because that’s what I was most comfortable in…and kids noticed. Girls whispered. Teachers watched and worried but didn’t push. I watched other girls get attention in ways I felt I never did, the body confidence, the attention from boys, and it made me resent my own body. I felt behind, wrong, and jealous in ways I didn’t say out loud.

     At the same time, I was quietly trying to name something I’d barely admit to myself, curiosity about my sexuality. I noticed girls the way other people talked about noticing them, and it frightened me more than anything. I had no words for it, no idea how to test it or explain it. So I kept those thoughts small and hidden, because adding that to everything else felt like too much.

     I wish I could say things that suddenly made sense. That I understood myself, or that the house stopped flooding, or that I stopped crying in hotel showers. I wish I could say I figured out how to stop feeling like I was rotting inside my own life.

     But the truth is, nothing fixed itself after that. 

     I just kept going.

     I kept waking up. I kept dragging myself to school. Kept wondering why I couldn’t look at myself and know who I was. Kept waiting for some version of me that felt steady, or sure, or clean.

     It didn’t come then.

     But neither did the end of me.

     You wake up, it's a new day. Everyday isn't perfect. Sometimes you have to be the change you want to see in the world but also yourself. Just try.

     And maybe that’s enough. For now.

My name is Lilly Soos, and I’m a first-year student at UC Clermont. I write creative nonfiction that explores family, memory, and the emotional weight of everyday experiences. Outside of school, I enjoy baking, coloring, painting, long hikes, and listening to music.