I’m writing this from a potential new writing spot. A laundromat across from my house, with checkered blue floors and light that streams in just right. The ambient sounds of too-loud Mariah Carey and turning laundry are wonderfully calming.
A laundromat is easy to romanticize, this is light work. The poetry and storytelling are almost too obvious. It stands so distinctly and obviously as a hallmark of a new era, a new regular setting in this new season. I came here to clean my bed sheets but that was really just a side project. I really came here to unlock a new space–and scope out the mise en scene. I came here to plot where I will lean against the machines watching the laundry spin with tears streaming shamelessly from my eyes, or on another kinder day, where I will sit with a small smile on my face the only giveaway that I have experienced victory–at last. It feels just right.
I moved here without a hiccup. Well, there were many hiccups, but, what I mean, is I moved here without a meltdown. I haven’t had one in a while, I think I have become much more resilient while I was busy minding the comings and goings of life. Is this what it feels like to be an adult? Surely not, my parents helped move me up, and I’m not sure if getting help from your parents still constitutes you as an adult. Is that an individualist ~capatilist~ myth that we should be these fully independent autonomous beings? I think maybe I should feel horribly guilty that I don’t just love my parents in this way that you must, but genuinely like them and know they would drop most things to help me. Though I don’t feel guilty, I just don’t. All I can feel is grateful.
This new timeline is calibrating to me as much as I am calibrating to it. I have run into many people who have told me that we should hang out when I get more settled. Yes, of course, I reply. The truth feels so apparent to me, that no new plot lines are ready to start moving, no new characters ready to get introduced before things calibrate. I avoided sleeping in my new apartment for the first two nights. We were like cats being introduced to each other, slowly getting acclimated before we were ready to live together. I was worried that the space didn’t feel like my own, but then I bought a dollar store candle with an image of angels and baby Jesus stickered to the side. Once I lit it I knew instantly that everything would be alright. This space was mine, and it was now blessed.
I am mapping out this new space. I’m painting you a picture. So, let me take you on a tour of this apartment. This new container.
It is a hundred years old (more or less). There is a stain-glassed window in it that is completely unremarkable except for the fact that it is a hundred years old and that means that it is considered heritage. This means that when this apartment gets torn down in September, they somehow have to maintain the window. The landlord said while explaining this to me, surely there are prettier stained glass windows to preserve. I agreed. Though unremarkable beauty is my favorite kind.
~the laundromat speakers just started playing high and dry by radio head, these vibes are very fitting~
Here are a few details worth mentioning…
I was reading Wabi Sabi for artists, designers, poets, and philosophers by Leonard Koren while apartment hunting. I was telling my friend over facetime that I feel like I accidentally manifested an apartment that is the absolute embodiment of Wabi Sabi.
“Things are either devolving towards or evolving from nothingness.” Hmm
This apartment’s beauty is everywhere, but only to the trained eye. Here in the peeling walls, and dirt that simply cannot be lifted from the corners of its wooden floors I understand something about the passage of time. Its absolute spaciousness (in relation to its surprisingly low rent) is like a small gift it offers. Yes, there is a whole mold colony wedged in between my peeling caulking, but you can have a studio, a bedroom, and a living area, I imagine it saying to me. Who else can offer you that?? (it continues). I concede that it is right. Right now, no other apartment can offer me this.
“Wabi-Sabi suggests that beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else.” Beauty, as I understand it, seems to be an action, rather than a passive object static in time. It requires a relationship between the self and the other. It is an “altered state of consciousness” it is a choice in that choosing to witness beauty activates its existence in the other. It occurs to me that this apartment needs me as much as I need it. In this new timeline, we are activating each other.
I’m going to get renovicted in September. That’s a dramatic way of saying that a signed a lease for just 6 months. These days, my eras can only really last this long, so I accept it although I wish I could stay in a space for longer. After I move out, the entire apartment is getting completely gutted. The magic is not lost on me that I will be the last person that will grace the walls of this figurative space. A hundred years worth of lives lived and I will be the last person to send it off before it goes to apartment heaven, or wherever spacial energies go when they are no more. I will be the last person that will be contained inside its beauty. The last person that will dance in its decay before it meets its end. I will send it off back into the nothingness. God, this poetry just writes itself.
I spend the last hours of the day deep cleaning the apartment, and setting it all up so the previous owner’s mark releases its grip. Ugh, I’m so exhausted! I might say to an acquaintance that I run into, but the secret is that I love this shit. Scrubbing on my hands and knees the dark recess behind the bathtub (a place I am sure the previous tenant hasn’t touched in over a decade) is how I’m trying to build some intimacy with this space. We are in this together, you and me, I’m trying to say.
It occurred to me last night while cleaning up how holy it was that I got to turn the peanut butter upside down because it was organic and that I got to play a podcast at top volume while doing the dishes. I simply could not believe how many women and ancestors had come before me that allowed me to get to this point, that allowed me to be alone in this apartment having complete sovereignty over a space that was my own. Maybe it was the joint I smoked just an hour before, but in that moment God felt like it was breathing. I couldn’t believe that just living felt like more than enough.
I’m signing off. Wish me luck.
-Thai