Sad Portrait of a 20-Something Doing Laundry

There are no fucking idiosyncracies with doing laundry. 

A spin cycle will always be a spin cycle, you’ll always wash your uniform with your bed sheets and towels and washcloths on cold and low spin for 23 minutes. You’ll dry the massive amalgam of wet things for 40 minutes or 55 if you aren’t doing laundry at the last minute as usual. You’ll fold clothes at your latest convenience while you're enthralled with music or some 20-minute video about a quirky big city girl with biting wit and short brown hair moving to be a quirky big city girl in a smaller apartment. 

None of the shirts twirl into that perfect triangle like your grilled cheese sandwiches. You'll convince yourself both were invented to eternally piss you off though you have a better handle of manipulating the shirt to your will. You'll fall into a habit of pressing your nose hoping to dredge up memories of your ex-girlfriend when she left her scent on each one you didn't choose to wear that day. 

You'll thank the heavens you didn't try to manipulate her to your will except you did but that detail evades you because these are only shirts and that was only the past. 

Your underwear will not shimmy into an impossibly pristine square because yours came in a package rolled in plastic and tied with rubber bands that hold things together tighter than you do. That's why your relationship ended; you couldn't rein in your emotions whenever your ex-girlfriend did something maddening like leave the toilet seat down or shave her legs over the kitchen sink. Your underwear comes in various patterns and colors which means they have more depth than you do and you fold them as aggressively as you addressed her when she mentioned your one-dimensional personality over scrambled eggs and mixed fruit one time. 

You will pore over your pajama pants that dance when you're in them meaning they're pointless otherwise. The pants you have on now stink like the nine-day-old Chinese food you refuse to toss in the same way you refuse to throw the pants in the hamper. You'll swap them out after your 30-minute shower/concert and mutter about how cute your ex-girlfriend was about you wearing the ones she adores; you know, the dark blue pair with the stripes, you guess. The panda ones have a hole that exposed enough of your ass for her to bury her hand in and grab a cheek when you sat down at the dining room table. 

Maybe the trash bin is the place for those instead of the hamper. 

By the time you reach the socks, you'll remember you wear one pair that you hardly wash or consider washing but out of curiosity, you wash this pair. It finally occurs to you more than halfway through the video that the quirky big city girl is five years younger than you and is moving to her fourth apartment, third by herself and here you are under your grandparents’ roof congratulating yourself for folding socks. She's garnered a sizable following on the internet for giving a wealth of advice on a wide range of topics that cover relationship, sex, and more while you are now resenting yourself for feeling accomplished washing and folding tube socks in half. Her job has afforded her the privilege of traveling to several locations around the world where she probably has worn plenty of socks and your miserable retail job can afford you the socks and the socks alone. You slam them on the ground in front of you when you realize your ex-girlfriend has possibly seen more of the world than you have as well given the two-year-long success of her blog, two years after she broke up with you. 

You head to work where you engage in several tasks that cause you to inevitably sweat through your clothes. The joy of laundry creates an odd form of escapism. Reality is a prison but you aren't trying to leave permanently; you're simply using the tunnel you dug in the wall for some twenty-odd years hiding behind the poster to see the world and duck back in before the guards check your cell on a routine patrol. You acknowledge there is more to life but this is how you began filling your void and this wound up becoming the most effective distraction. Disconnecting yourself from it would mean finding another filler and you're too lazy for that. 

Even in your dreams, you're doing laundry. As luck has it, this is how you meet your ex-girlfriend before she gains the title of ex. You scrounge for coins around your apartment and manage to have the exact $2.25 you need to wash your clothes but this means you have nothing left to release your rage towards a vending machine. When you waltz into the laundromat, you find her washing a commendable load of whites in a smile that causes whatever sour mood to dissipate. 

Your gaze doesn't hold hers because she is the epitome of beauty with her clear dark skin and her equally dark ponytail and how dare you set your peasant eyes upon her glistening brown eyes? Laundry, for her, is an art form as she dances everything into the washer, occasionally teasing her hair while she waits for the wild machine to soften into a calming hymn. You're wordless and unknowingly creepy, admiring the spin cycle and you haven't watched the washer she's using once. It isn't until she sets her clothes into the dryer that she rests her eyes on you for a brief second and they smile wanting you to come over or they’re being friendly. 

As an added bonus, she doesn’t rage with the vending machine and nabs you those disgusting green onion and salsa chips you claimed you needed to try on your way to the laundromat. Bon appetit. 

You black out though and you don't run into her again until you're on the bus. Despite the change of setting, your common ground is washing clothes. You regale each other with tales of people in your life throwing their piss-stained clothes in the wash with your slightly smelly ones. Your parents were obsessed with the laundry when they were alive and you both witnessed the process in awe. Both of you chuckle at the idea of being branded as weird by your friends for enjoying such a “boring and menial task”. 

The first date is cheap and inexpensive in a crowded burger joint with obnoxiously loud adults and teenagers clamoring for their food. Their volume needs to be turned down 10,000 notches but somehow, your conversation about doing laundry cuts through all that. Regardless of how varied your talking is- politics, love, sex, conspiracies, the history of family dysfunction- it circles back to laundry and that never goes dry on either of you. 

She is grateful for the night and agrees for another in a movie theater and another noisy fast food joint with less meat and miraculously, less people. It isn't a ghost town and it's far from a serene dip in a secluded stream in the woods but you don't have to yell to hear each other. She notices your shirt is warm as if it was a freshly-baked brownie and she recognizes that scent of lavender fabric softener instantly. You deliver this mock-surprise and she shoves you in an adorable giggle and snort combination you melt over. This is the only person you've dated who you've ever fallen madly in love with and you hope she reciprocates the feeling. 

On the next date, you learn how to make pizzas and you snicker when you make the observation of her change in detergent from yellow rose-scented to lilac-scented. She giggles into your shirt and you both cackle as it registers too late that she has flour on her fingers from the first Margherita pizza she attempts. The instructor can't contain herself and joins you both in your natural fits of laughter. You attempt the same type of pizza and you tear the dough the first go-round, on the second, you can't spin the dough high enough to make it circular the way you need it to be but on the final try, you manage to nail it or at least make it edible. You think after seeing countless spin cycles, you would know how pizza dough should turn. 

After several more dates, she suggests you do laundry together at her place. Her laundry room is not as big as the one you're accustomed to seeing but it's got homey touches that make it quaint and inviting. It's got more character than you do but she doesn't know that yet because she'd be expertly avoiding all the issues you have to offer. 

Six months into dating, you move into her place and you are inseparable. Wherever she is, you're there with a bottle of detergent in hand. Her washer and dryer are not as fancy as you're familiar with; in fact, they're hand-me-downs and they don't bother you until the noise grows infuriating enough for you to bring it to her attention which she magically isn't bugged by.

You and she cut your food and eat with the same hands, you both sleep in a fetal position because it's the most comfortable you can be in bed and you need to watch TV before you call it a night. You both sing in the shower at a minimum noise level and cheer when the other is bathing. Most importantly, the detergent and fabric softener you use are the exact same or identical at the least. Unfortunately, that's where the similarities end and the honeymoon phase comes to a screeching halt. 

She cares about her hygiene but cares about it over the kitchen sink whether it's brushing her teeth or shaving anything on any part of her body. She has the seat down when she uses the bathroom and keeps it that way when she's finished. She always sets the thermometer below 70° F as she feels she is constantly burning up. However, you forget that you're upset over these hair-pulling, teeth-grinding matters when you do laundry together because that's where your shared heaven is. 

You snore like an audience of hand-saws cutting through the thickest collection of logs though you insist you do this because you struggle to breathe at night without it. You clip your toes in the middle of the living room and sweeping up your stray nails is the furthest thing from your mind when you're done. You always set the thermometer to 70° F when you feel you're freezing. However, her anger towards you is a distant memory when you do laundry together because that's your center of peace. 

You are, sadly, as exciting as a dry sponge, revealing that you were extroverted to win her over. And despite your common appreciation for doing laundry, she chides you when she finds that's the one area you show depth in. You're not funny, you can't cook, you don't watch movies/shows/anything and rarely express any sort of emotion towards anything when she successfully drags you out of the house aside from annoyance or anger. Ironically, you chastise her for being too layered and “personality-driven” because it drains you of energy she doubts you have to begin with. 

Amidst your grievances with each other, the worst thing that either of you do is change out your usual detergent/fabric softener combo because your conversations devolve into domestic spats about why the forest pine scent is superior or inferior to the sakura blossom scent. You have never been to Japan to touch or view sakura blossoms but you assume the creators of the detergent and fabric softener did so you defend the scent to the ends of the Earth. On the other hand, she has seen and lived among pine trees for a solid chunk of her life prior to moving to a big city and furiously recites how many pine needles a pine tree has before storming off to her room. 

Laundry grows to eventually become a chore you and her dread sharing responsibility for. You need your uniform but she needs her favorite pajamas to work at her office desk and though you nearly compromise by washing your load together, you ultimately wind up sparring over whose ideal washer and dryer setup happens at which time. She doesn't tell you your pajamas are cute anymore, you don't hope she teases her hair anymore and after the first six months of pure bliss and the next six months of unfiltered agony, she breaks up with you. 

She starts a blog and you anticipate she'll use it to undercut your importance in her life but she mentions you in a sentence that doesn't dismiss you or praise you and keeps it moving. Contrary to what your pesky insecurity makes you feel, she doesn't hold your litany of issues against you. You are even invited to a party she's throwing for the first anniversary of her blog and you can't miss an opportunity to properly apologize for the way you clashed with her especially over laundry. 

Meanwhile, you move back in with your grandparents who remind you that you made a costly mistake messing things up with her because someone has to cook for them when they don't feel up to it (Hint: certainly not their one-dimensional grandchild aka you). They believe the party can help rekindle something between you two but you enter her place to the sight of a new man in her arms and then you’ve grown too far apart for reconciliation. Not too far apart for her to accept your apology and she offers one of her own in return. You laugh and smile about laundry again though the smiles are pained and the laughs almost veer into tearful territory. You exit the party glad you showed up but wishing you don’t remember living through it and never break the news to your grandparents; they realize it when they arrive home one day to zero plates of homemade spinach tortellini. 

There are no fucking idiosyncracies with doing laundry.

There’s only the spin cycle, the cold and low spin, the drying, the folding and the question of whether or not that quirky big city girl is single.