laundromat

It’s 2am and I was planning on being asleep right now, but the yarn of time slipped through my fingers. The music outside is loud and rhythmic and of my time.

Thursday night I came back to the apartment and heard a girl on the other side of the wall (outside, walking on the street) say “no, you're not listening. My mother is a very forgiving person. All you need to do is show her that you can be a good girl” - in a voice filled with patient insistence. I had been out with Kostya, at his friend Cat’s birthday party. It was at the Bowery Diner in the Lower East Side. Happy hour drinks enticed me to order cocktails for the first time since I was 18: The Green Antoinette, and a Grace Kelley (which had a candied hibiscus flower). I think the birthday girl enjoyed herself. She tried convincing me to come to Hawaii with her next winter vacation.

When I was little, my father would sometimes take me with him to the laundromat of the apartment complex we lived in. I would get to line up the quarters in a row in the little slots before pushing them in to be eaten by the machine. The place I went to this morning had a different way of putting in the quarters (just one slot, where you put the coins in one by one: five for the wash, and one for the dryer, but three times). After that Sasha and I went to the Guggenheim. The Wool exhibition wasn’t my favorite, but they also had a small room with some late Kandinsky paintings and another room with various painters (Picasso, Cézanne, Gauguin …) Mostly I enjoyed the architecture of the building: walking along the inner rim, the hum of vertigo by my side.