by Michael Abraham
My mom always told me if I didn’t separate my lights from my darks, I would ding my white laundry. I always thought this was nonsense. And, in fact, in the fancy washing machine in the apartment I shared with my husband, this was nonsense. Oh, I was absolutely reckless! I would toss bright red shirts in with white sheets and black jeans in with cream-colored t’s. And it was always alright in the end. The whites stayed white, and the colors did not fade. I was confident in my millennial assessment that separating the lights from the darks was simply Gen X anxiety, old wisdom, no longer applicable, démodé even.
Divorce means many things, and, well, one of the things that mine means is that I no longer have a fancy, in-unit washing machine. So, I am at the laundromat as I write this. And I have just finished the wash cycle. I pull my clothes out one by one to put them into the wheeled hand cart that will transport them to the dryer. I pull out a few pink shirts and a few blue shirts, and these look fine, smell fresh. And then I pull out the first white one, and it is gray. And then the next white one: gray. And so on and so forth. They are all dinged, ruined, good only for sleeping in. (My mother tells me on a phone call that I can bleach out this mistake, and this time I trust her Gen X wisdom.) I hold in my frustration. I try to chuckle about it. I load the dryer, and I go for a drink at the bar down the street (it is Sunday after all), where—after a rousing conversation with the bartender, Pedro—I continue to write this. I pray that, if someone steals my laundry, they only steal the once-white, gray t-shirts. At this point, I don’t much care.
The laundromat is an apt metaphor for where I’m at in my life right now. Read more »