My apartment doesn't have a washer, so every Sunday I haul two bags to the laundromat on 31st Avenue in Astoria, and I have decided this is my temple.
Hear me out.
Nobody performs at a laundromat. You cannot be your LinkedIn self at a laundromat on 31st Avenue at 9am with unwashed hair and a canvas bag that says a tote bag joke you regret buying. There is a great humbling in watching your own underwear spin in public.
There's a Greek yiayia who is always there before me. She folds like a surgeon. Once she watched me ball my t-shirts into a wad and shoved a fitted sheet into my hands like, sit down child, let me teach you. She didn't speak much English. She didn't need to.
In the fashion world I fold clothes for a living, sort of. I steam, I style, I obsess over a hem. But there's something about the 31st Avenue laundromat that resets all of it. Just cotton and warmth and the churn.
Astoria on a Sunday is the best version of Queens. The N and W rumbling overhead. Souvlaki smell by noon. Old men arguing about something eternal outside the coffee place. Everyone's grandmother is somebody.
I sit with a chai from the corner and I let my brain go quiet for forty minutes. No phone. Just the dryer window like a tiny cinema.
And when the buzzer goes and I pull out warm sheets and hold them to my face — I swear that's the most spiritual I get all week. Better than any wellness app. My 31st Avenue laundromat charges $3.75 and asks nothing of me.
We make gods of the strangest places out here. Mine has a change machine that eats quarters.
Tell me where yours is.
Love,