Laundromat Perspective I

It's laundry day again.  The rain is falling lightly as the sky darkens into a warm October night.  The lights, fluorescent and painful, glare down upon the aging rows of washers and dryers, change machines and 1980's video games.  The air inside the place is warm and dampish in a way that is far different from the air outside.  Christ, I think as I walk in, this place is dirty.  How can a place like this, where you go to get things clean, seem so grimy?  At least it smells good.  It smells of safety and of warmth, all that clean fabric, all those soap suds. It makes me think of childhood and of my mother.  It makes me think of babies fresh out of the bath, being swaddled in a warm, fluffy towel to get dried and to keep warm.  It makes me think of that damned adorable talking teddy bear from the fabric softener commercials of my childhood, because that's how I've always thought it would smell.  I walk past my fellow launderers, picking up snippets of conversations, most in English, some in Spanish, some in languages I'm not sure I know.  No one looks at me strangely, though I'm wearing my pajama pants with little duckies on them, an outsized white T-shirt with some beer logo on it, though my as yet un-brushed hair is tied into a huge knot on top of my head.  No one looks at me strangely despite the holes in my face, despite the hot pink streaks that shoot through my long, thick black hair.  The laundromat, I conclude as I throw my clothes into the washers, is a place without pretensions, a place without judgements.  The laundromat is a place where everyone goes with a common purpose and where no one cares what you are in your own little world.  The laundromat is just where you go to wash your clothes.