(A Small Hymn to Soap, Survival, and Starting Over)
If God exists, he does not fold his clothes.
He leaves them to dry on hostel bunk rails, strung out like prayer flags between strangers’ backpacks and half-empty bottles of cheap shampoo. He knows the holy ritual isn’t in the folding. It’s in the washing. The quiet humiliation of it. The scraping out of stains with your fingernails at 2 a.m. while everyone else sleeps.
You learn this early if you travel long enough: no one’s coming to save you from your own filth. Not your mother. Not your ex. Not the front desk with their useless stack of towels. There is only you, the cracked porcelain basin, the bar of soap shaped like regret, and the water — cold, indifferent, necessary.
This is where you meet yourself. Bent over, hungover, sleeves rolled, praying softly to no one in particular that this shirt dries by morning because it’s the only one you’ve got left that doesn’t smell like despair.
You thought you came here for adventure. For stories. For some beautiful, cinematic unraveling.
Instead, you came for this:
The quiet ache of your body leaning into the faucet.
The slow circling of your hands through water gone cloudy with yesterday’s sins.
The understanding that survival is rarely glamorous, often damp, and always your own responsibility.
No one Instagrams this part.
No one writes songs about the soap-stained sink or the cracked mirror catching your tired reflection.
But this is where the real work happens.
The shedding.
The cleansing.
The tiny, defiant act of scrubbing yourself back into the world.
There’s theology in that, if you squint hard enough.
Salvation isn’t found at sunrise on some mountaintop.
It’s found here, in the hostel sink at the end of the hall, where the water runs brown at first and then clear.
Tomorrow, you’ll wear that shirt again.
You’ll sweat in it.
You’ll spill beer on it.
You’ll sleep in it, maybe next to someone whose name you don’t know yet.
And the next night, you’ll wash it again.
Because moving forward — leaving, escaping, surviving — has nothing to do with grand gestures and everything to do with showing up, over and over, to scrub your own stains away.
If there’s a god, he understands this.
He knows we don’t fold shirts.
We rinse them out, wring them dry, and hang them somewhere between hope and habit.
And then we move on.
