The Machine Ate the Quarters

October twenty-sixth. I put off doing laundry for exactly one week too many, which I know because I had to make decisions this morning about which combination of things still qualified as an outfit. The answer was: technically yes, but only if I didn't look too hard at it.

The laundromat two blocks over has a change machine that works about sixty percent of the time. Today was the other forty percent. I stood there feeding it a five-dollar bill, watching it reject the same bill four times before accepting it on the fifth try, which felt like a personality test I was failing in real time. Then the big washer ate a quarter mid-cycle and made a sound it absolutely should not have made, and I stood very still for a moment doing the math on whether this was going to become a whole thing. It was not a whole thing. The cycle ran.

the particular nothing of laundromat waiting

I had not brought anything to do. I know myself well enough to know I should always bring something to do, a book, the notebook, literally anything, and I still showed up with nothing but my phone and the residual confidence that I would figure it out. I did not figure it out. I sat in the plastic chair by the window and watched the drum go around and thought about the budget sheet still on the kitchen table, and the block I've walked twice now, and whether the pasta water thing had finally finished chewing on me. The washer ran forty-two minutes. That is a long time to think about pasta water.

this is not my sock. or it is my sock and I have simply never seen it before.

Everything came out clean, which is the only actual goal, and I found a sock in the load that I am sixty percent sure is mine. The change machine kept one of my quarters in the end. I let it go. Some Saturdays are just like that, not bad, not good, just the ordinary cost of having laundry.