After Keith launched my pillow from the bed to the floor (I am going to shamelessly include zero context, because that’s just who I am, sorry you had to find out this way), I knew it was time to start my morning.

I don’t want it to come off as a bitter one, and so I do the things around the house that I do well. In a burst of motivation, I shore up a bag of dirty laundry and haul it down to the local mat, which boasts its 21-hour a day self-service and newly upgraded machines.

It’s early. Not so early that my Dad would still be doing laundry at this hour, but early enough that most people toting their parcels of dirty things to the mat had not yet made their way. If you asked me, this was a pretty good time to go.

By the time I return for the drying sequence, it is mid-morning opposed to early-morning and there is a bit more action about, particularly a big, chill looking guy coming in and using the machine I had just emptied, a woman loading a machine on the opposite side of the mat, and two old biddies notably looking me up and down.

I’ll be the first, second, and last to admit that I get a little paranoid about people looking at me or talking about me, and usually it doesn’t happen, and even less (I choose to believe…) does it happen maliciously. 

There’s nothing special about me today. On the contrary, I look pretty homely and drab. Can anybody guess why? Well, if you’re listening at all, you would know it’s laundry day. So I wore what I had.

Secondly, it’s Thursday, but it might as well be my Tuesday, and that’s more of a do-shit kind of day than a doll-up day.

It could have not been me that triggered their remarks, but it certainly felt like it when the biddies spoke of women wearing leggings like pants and sounding quite disgusted. Well, that’s not far off from how I was dressed, but there was definitely nothing wrong with what I was wearing at the mat at 9AM. 

I try not to look at them, mostly because my wet clothes were attacked by some kind of paper or napkin, and everything was covered in little tiny specks of its disintegrated remains, and I need to focus. I want to pull my shirt down and cover my ass.

I feel a Diner Days coming on.

I think I am overreacting, and I’m not the source of such conversation. Even if I was, does it really matter? They’re biddies. I’m normal.

And then I know it is me, because there’s no cause for the conversation to suddenly go to “people with ridiculous rainbow hair”. Ohhh. That’s a bit precise.

People often point to my head and say things like “Skittles” or “Rainbow Dash”. The biddies don’t sound anything like those people.

I throw like 8 dryer sheets in the machine, grab the big black laundry bag equally good for a miles-worth of yard waste, and fly outta there. “I probably won’t see them again,” I tell myself, and I don’t.

“Gross, doesn’t sound like she’s a girls girl,” said yesterday’s Pandy in response to a very different insult I encountered. It continues to resonate with me now.

I leave the laundro and there is a woman in a grassy section of the parking lot, digging a ditch to presumably pour concrete or lay foundation. She looks up at me, and with a face splotched with dirt, she smiles. I smile back.

A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

I drive Keith to work and we bicker about pillows. We sound like old lovers. I kiss him off for the day and get uninterrupted music from the radio the entire drive back to town. Thanks, Carolyn.

^{Thursday September 5th, 2024}

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