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At the dawn of every new day, Kim Sunoo finds himself facing the herculean task of doing his laundry.
He freshens up, eats a quick meal, and then begins a walk on the road that stretches out to the horizon. Vast tracts of flatlands seem to splay from him as a central point, into an infinite universe that has no end.
Soon, he reaches the one building that he spots beside the road - a laundromat. The laundromat. Part of its exterior is painted blue, most notably the rooftop and the margins of the building. The other part is simply cream-colored walls. A single simple signage says “Laundromat” in a plain black font. The large windows show the lined up washing machines, ready to perform their work of the existential horror that was cleaning up dirty clothes.
Sunoo remembers a quote from a long forgotten memory. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” The washing machine must imagine itself happy. It must fulfil the task Sunoo bestows on it. It must clean the dirty clothes as it must clean its soul. Sunoo must imagine himself as the famed and oft-pitied Sisyphus, the laundry his boulder, the washing machines his hill, the universe the gods that had condemned him to this.
Suddenly he was Sisyphus. But he had assumed the washing machine would be.
Never mind. There is a distinctly bright yellow door awaiting his entrance.
So Sunoo puts his hand on the handle and walks in. His nose is immediately assaulted by the pronounced odor of detergent. It is fresh, but it is his boulder too. He sighs and walks in.
He chooses the third washing machine. As always. It awaits him, just as Sisyphus awaits his boulder. Suddenly, the machine is Sisyphus. Sunoo imagines it drinking, eating, dancing, and engaging in procreation. It’s not that he sees a lot of examples of it now. It’s him alone, him in this vast lonely plane of flatlands and a laundromat.
The cotton white clothes go first. Sunoo separates them from the rest. What is even the meaning of this? If his whites get soiled, maybe they deserve it. What allows them to be this sensitive?
He opens the door of the washing machine. It stares at him, like a massive eye suspended in the universe. Sunoo pushes in the clothes. He adds the detergent next, finding it on the top of the machine.
But before he can choose the settings on this dreadful contraption, someone walks in.
The bell rings. In front of the closed door stands a tall man. He carries a heavy jet black mane of hair on his head, many parts of them falling on his chestnut eyes. He blinks carefully as he eyes the machines, and then Sunoo. His lips part a little, before he unceremoniously shuts them and walks over to the second machine, just beside Sunoo.
He gives a quick nod. Sunoo notices more. Sunoo notices how awkwardly he waddles over, how flowy his white clothes look, almost resembling a desert robe, how he bites his lip as he stands in front of the washing machine.
“You separate your clothes first,” Sunoo says.
“Oh,” the man nods to himself. It takes him a few seconds to turn around and dig into his bag of clothes.
“By color,” Sunoo adds. “Or fabric. Or both. But mostly by color. Whites can get soiled.”
The man nods again. His eyes refuse to meet Sunoo’s. He starts picking apart his clothes.
They’re all white.
Sunoo purses his lips. Not a single colored cloth. He turns his head to eye his own laundry - which mostly possesses an exuberant collection of colors, mixed with the rare whites.
The man stands up. His eyes don’t meet Sunoo’s. But it’s clear he’s asking for the next step.
“Uh, open the lid…?” Sunoo says. His conjecture was it must be natural for anyone like him to know how laundry is done. But perhaps this man wasn’t Sisyphus. Yet. Maybe he had only been recently condemned.
“Right,” the man replies and follows his instructions. He recklessly throws all his clothes in and shuts the lid. Sunoo frowns.
“Open the door again and put the detergent in the compartment inside. That will… clean the clothes,” Sunoo suggests.
The man pauses for a few seconds. Sunoo passes him his own detergent. In it goes. And the man shuts the door again.
“Your clothes are cotton?” Sunoo asks. The man nods wordlessly. “Okay. Then choose the setting for warm water, regular cycle and high spin speed.”
The man does what Sunoo asks him. Sunoo does the same. The machines start whirring. The two men observe them carefully.
Sunoo goes to take a seat on the bench. The man’s gaze flits around before he does the same. Their eyes remain fixated on the machines, not once sparing a glance at each other.
“What’s your name?” Sunoo finally finds the courage to ask.
“Sunghoon,” the man replies.
“What are you doing here?”
Sunghoon doesn’t answer. Sunoo waits a few minutes. The light, as usual, never changes.
“You didn’t know how to do your laundry,” he comments.
“I’m new. Still exploring around here.”
“You don’t make good excuses. They taught us laundry millenia back.”
Sunghoon only bites his lip as Sunoo passes him a quick glance. He has such sharp features. It’s fascinating to Sunoo.
“I don’t get what… realm this is. Or time. Or a massive warp of spacetime.”
Sunoo chuckled. “My theory? It’s a black hole.”
“What makes you think that?”
“There is no darkness in this place. There is only light. But there’s no visible source of light. Remember? Light never escapes a black hole. Some weird distortion probably created this world. And we’re Sisyphus, condemned to live in it. We might be immortal, but even we cannot escape a black hole.”
“Sisyphus?”
“Greek figure. The gods condemned him to an eternity of punishment, rolling a boulder up a hill. But it would eventually come down, and Sisyphus would have to do this task again. Just as you and I would have to do the laundry everyday.”
Sunghoon finally spared him a glance. “You remember all of this?”
Sunoo leaned back. The bench had no support. But the cold wall behind it was support enough. “I have an entire library with me. It’s an eclectic one, but it has taught me a lot. I was just reading his myth again, when it striked me that the nature of my sweet suffering is similar.”
“So we’re stuck in eternal suffering?”
“No. We must imagine Sisyphus happy. We must rebel against the sheer absurdity of a black hole trapping us forever in a system of light. There might be no meaning, but we must imagine ourselves happy.”
Sunghoon was finally looking at him. On his face was written childish curiosity, but in his eyes was the curiosity of an aged man rediscovering life. The contrast was fascinating. It was almost like the infinite circle of the snake biting its tail. The end meets the beginning, the young meets the old. Sunoo meets this strange man.
“What if we… created something here?” Sunghoon asked. “We can make Sisyphus happier.”
Sunoo blinked. “There’s no material to make anything.”
“The lost stars exist. The stars that the black hole sucked in. We can bring them here. Or search for them across these flatlands, use them to fashion newer things for us, a new life.”
We must imagine Sisyphus happy. We must imagine he has a purpose, even in the meaningless of everything that exists from the start of time to the end of it. Sunoo had forgotten this basic principle.
He finds himself smiling. “An optimist, aren’t you?”
The man looks even more curious. His eyes twinkle. “Let’s do it. We have an eternity anyway.”
We must imagine Sisyphus happy. But we must also imagine him alone.
Well, then Sunoo must not be Sisyphus. There was this man in front of him, wearing the strangest clothes he had ever seen. A man who didn’t even know how to do laundry. But he must have met him somewhere. There was a familiarity all over his face, a warmth, a comfort that emanated from him even inside this black hole.
“Have you heard of a sport named figure skating?” Sunoo finds himself asking. It was a rather sudden question that popped up in his head without any apparent immediate meaning.
Sunghoon tilts his head. “I only vaguely remember it. Strange, but beautiful movements. I’d… like to try them if I could.”
“What if you did try them? When we weren’t immortals? What if you’ve just forgotten?”
Sunghoon blinks at him. Sunoo notices how the other man’s gaze doesn’t leave him at all now. “Then I would want to try it again.”
Sunoo smiles. “Shall we go star hunting then?” He asks.
Sunghoon nods eagerly. He eyes the laundry for a few seconds before Sunoo shrugs.
“We’ll attend to that later. We have an eternity, right? The laundry can wait. The boulder can wait.”
So off they go, into this wide world of flatlands, a laundromat, and two houses, suddenly side-by-side. Sunoo did not even know he had a new neighbor.
He sings, and Sunghoon asks him to do it more, for he must have heard this same melody somewhere before, this same voice in another realm. Time doesn’t exist anymore for them, only the lost and forgotten stars do. He laughs, and Sunghoon asks him to do it even more. “I’ve heard your laughter somewhere before”, he comments. Sunoo is delirious. “Sure”, he replies. “I guess it’s the music of the universe.”
The laundry can wait. For Sunoo has a new neighbor, who can jump into the air and perform spins that make his eyes wide in awe and excitement, who asks him to sing when they go searching for the stars again in the endless horizon, who starts laying on him little kisses when he laughs.
The laundry can wait. For there was now love in this light-filled eternity.
One must imagine Sisyphus in love.