How to Break Someone Completely Using One Simple Household Object

Do you want to know how to truly terrify a person?  How to freak them out and mess with their mind?  Do you know how to break someone?  As a broken man, I will tell you how.  All you would have to do is slip one tiny, insignificant item into their laundry pile, and then sit back and watch the fireworks.  I should know.  It happened to me.  Yesterday, as I was taking my laundry out of the washer to put it into the dryer, I found a crayon wrapper.

Where was the crayon?!  It had to be in there somewhere, and, while washing a crayon might not be the best thing in the world for your clothes, I knew that drying a crayon was a terrible idea.  I pulled out the clothes and searched for the missing stick of melt-able wax, but I found nothing.  Growing more agitated by the moment, I pawed my way frantically through the pile of wet clothes again.  Still, I found nothing.  Desperation setting in, I felt around the inside of the washer, thinking that perhaps the crayon that went with the wrapper had been left behind in the machine, but it had not.  There was no crayon.

That was when I started arguing with myself.  What if there was no crayon?  What if the wrapper had come off of the crayon and gotten into the laundry somehow and I was searching in vain?  Maybe I should just throw the clothes into the dryer and hope for the best…  But no!  The risk was too great!  If there was even a tiny chance that all of my clothes, and, more importantly, all of my wife’s clothes were going to come out of that dryer covered in hardened burnt sienna, I had to keep searching.  So I painstakingly inspected each piece of wet clothing, determined to find the thing and save the day.

I found nothing.  Now my mental bargaining went into hyperdrive.  It was clear that there was no crayon in this load of damp and soggy laundry, so I should cut my losses and dry them.  Right?  I was running out of time already, there was more laundry to do, dishes to wash, errands to run, and life to live, none of which could be accomplished by sitting there agonizing over a possibly fictitious crayon.  On the other hand, had I checked thoroughly enough?  Could the crayon be in a side pocket of some piece of clothing that I had overlooked?  Caught in the crook of a sleeve?  It had been through the washer after all.  It could have been flung into almost anywhere, and sure I thought I had done a good job checking every piece of laundry, but was it possible that I had missed it on my first several passes through?

In the end, I couldn’t play that game any longer.  I could never prove, beyond all certainly of a doubt, that there was no crayon in the laundry.  I had plenty of strong circumstantial evidence that pointed to a crayon, but I also had a great deal of subsequent data that found no trace of it.  Had there been a crayon once, long ago, but no longer?  Had the evidence of a crayon been planted in my laundry to test my faith in crayons in general?  The only way to prove the crayontionists right was to find the crayon, and there was absolutely no way to prove them wrong.  I could not disprove a crayon.  Well, except for one way.  I had to cross over to the other side.  And so, with trembling hands, I placed my quarters into the dryer and pushed start.

The clothes came out fine.  There was no crayon.  Just a crayon wrapper that had somehow made its way into the laundry.  And as I continued to do more laundry throughout the day, I laughed at how foolish I had been.  All of the signs were clear to me now, if I really examined the evidence.  There was only half of a wrapper.  Had there been a whole wrapper, a crayon would have been more certain, but with only half a wrapper, wasn’t it more likely that the crayon had been half-used, making it probable that the wrapper had come off of the crayon at some point and then wafted its way into the laundry basket, as household items often do when there are children around?  How silly and simple of me to have spent so long looking for a crayon that, as was so clear to me now, did not, and had not ever, existed?

I did three more loads of laundry, never worrying again about the crayon.  I found no more wrappers, and no more evidence.  My mind was at ease with my certainty.  What I did find, as I was pulling the last load out of the washer for drying, was a really gross looking wad of hair or something that had become half trapped in the rubber seal that held the water and clothes in tight, as this was a front loading washer.  I did not want to touch it but, as these are community machines, I did feel responsible for making sure that the washer was clean and nice for the next person.  So I summoned up my courage and summoned down my gag reflex, pulling the hair out of the lining.  And as I pulled, I saw something else stuck in between the two folds of rubber that served as a seal.  Tossing the hair out, I reached back into the folds and pulled out half of a burnt sienna crayon that had become trapped during my first load of laundry.  At any time it could have come loose and made its way into the dryer with each of the five loads I did.  I dodged a bullet for sure.  It also meant that the crayon had been there the whole time, through all of the loads and all of the clothes.  I had just been looking in the wrong place for it, thorough as I thought I had been.  And so now I am completely broken; I am a shell of my former self.  Mind blown, soul shaken, and laundry saved.  I think I need therapy.