When you walk in it hits you, the sweet miasma of half a dozen different brands of laundry soap and fabric softener, with a faint undertone of mildew.
The air is oppressively hot and thick, not a comfortable warmth but a smothering cloud. The floor is swept and mopped, but around the edges and in the corners you'll find years worth of grime, sticky with lint and dust and other detritus. It's strangely dim, despite the requisite and inevitably flickering fluorescent lighting.
Uncomfortable plastic chairs sit unceremoniously under the window of the store front, a silent audience waiting to watch a plotless story unfold. The machines counting down and time is lost here, like that one sock in the dryer.
There are unspoken rules here. It is first come, first serve. When the machine stops, don't let it sit, get the sopping clothes out, someone else is always waiting. Don't use more than two machines at once. And don't use the large-capacity machine for a normal size load. Always mind your business. No eye contact. Speak only when spoken to. Bring a book. The problem is that there are other people here, and as we all know, hell is other people. Hell is other people at a laundromat. No one is at their best, no one wants to be here. There is a melancholy here, it lingers like the heavy smell of detergent. I don't know why I am drawn to these spaces. Familiarity with how liminal spaces make one feel, perhaps. The private made public, a strange study in voyeurism. The banality of sadness and cycles. The waiting. The thinking. Your mind turns and turns and turns and turns as the drum spins and spins and spins and spins. An endless cycle of thought and soap. The ability to leave that space and the feelings it brings.
Who knows. It all comes out in the wash in the end.
Perhaps it is just as well that this place is so devoid of energy and life. We might all of us come apart at the seams, were we not so listless here.
I told a friend I had to go there to wash a duvet due to my lack of a washer big enough. "Just roll it up like a snake and wrap it around the inside of your machine," he said. "It will unravel as it gets agitated."
It will unravel as it gets agitated. Don't we all?