The Fluorescent Hours

May twenty-first. There is a particular quality to a Sunday afternoon in a laundromat, the light, first of all, which is the color of mild institutional defeat, and then the chairs, which are the shade of orange that suggests someone once tried. Simone and I went together because neither of us wanted to go alone and because splitting the parking situation seemed vaguely more efficient in theory. It was not more efficient. There was no parking. We circled for twelve minutes and then put the car in a lot two blocks over and carried the bags on foot in the way you do when you've already committed and turning back would be worse.

We were there for almost an hour and a half. I do not fully understand how. Two loads between us, one of which was mine and required the large machine in the corner, which was occupied by someone's king-size comforter for the entire first forty minutes. Simone folded with the focus of someone who had decided to make it mean something. I folded with the focus of someone watching the clock. At one point she leaned back in one of the orange chairs and I took a photograph because it looked exactly like how I felt, which I realize is not a sentence that makes grammatical sense but is accurate nonetheless.

folding on autopilot, thinking about nothing and everything

The printmaking night at the framing shop is still a sentence in my draft folder. The laundromat visit is now a fact I can account for. These feel like they belong in the same paragraph, somehow, the things you do versus the things you're still turning over. I didn't think about that connection until I was folding on autopilot at the counter and the machine behind me was making the sound it makes in the last few minutes, the one that means almost, almost, almost.

the waiting portion of the program

We carried the bags back to the car. Both of us quieter than we'd arrived. The good kind of quiet, I think, the kind that comes after something ordinary was completed without incident, which is its own small result. I got home and put the laundry away before I sat down, which I'm noting here because it almost never happens that way.