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On a Friday evening I am home alone bringing roughly 14 quarts of water to a boil, listening to Cate le Bon while I wait. By the time the water is rolling, the album has ended and Spotify’s algorithm has replaced it with a rotation of familiar femme-fronted songs. The take-off at the beginning of Mr Twin Sister’s “Rude Boy.” The bopping bass in Okay Kaya’s “Mother Nature’s Bitch.” The spooky chords at the beginning of Grace Ives’ “Mirror.”
Barefoot, I take a drink of water — a habit I’m currently nurturing — and walk over to the stove. Our freshly washed kitchen towels are stacked beside the pot. However washed they pretend to be, they are still dirty. It’s enough to drive a girl mad.
I sandwich the towels between my hands and drop them into the water. Then I open a pack of disposable chopsticks I found in the junk drawer and poke the towels beneath the water’s surface. They remain tightly stacked as they go under, like a bunch of linens spooning in a hot tub.
I stare blankly at the caressing towels before wandering off to check my phone. I have a notification (ok, an e-mail from mom) about a job in communications. Caring mothers worry about their freelancing children. The thought of landing a full-time job with a predictable salary is as relieving as it is stifling. Why do I have such an aversion to things I might actually need?
A quick glance at the job title and pay, and my finger is on the phone’s lock button. My hand tosses the phone back onto the counter, and I return to look at my towels. Unsatisfied with their stillness, I use the wooden chopsticks to shove them around a little. I’m expecting the chopsticks to snap at any moment, but I keep shoving.
Imagine if I did get a full time job. Something in this YouTube-inspired deep cleaning moment seems to gently say “It’s time to grow up, babe.”
But as lost as I might feel trying to clean towels in a canning pot, I believe in the validity of this moment. There is no doubt that this is moment is very “me,” and that could be a nice thing if I let it. Better to notice now than four months down the road when it’s too late. I can see myself in a staff kitchen fondling the hand towel and looking back on this night, thinking “that could be us, but you had to go get hired.”
The towels have been lounging in their smelly cauldron for 15 minutes. So as per the suggestion of one very flat YouTuber, I take them to the sink and do a sloppy job of pouring out the water. It looks dirty, which I pray is a good sign. If I’m lucky, all of the dirt and mess from life up til now is being rinsed away.
Such a fuss over something so simple. I wash our kitchen towels like any other person, or so I think. So why are my Google searches echoed by no one? I feel lonely in my quest for straightforward answers.
I’m always trying to figure something out. Sometimes it’s towels. Sometimes it’s whether or not I need to change my work strategy. Sometimes it’s why I feel the way I feel. It frustrates me that even in the category of linens the answers aren’t obvious. Perhaps it’s the Libra in me, i.e. the part of my brain that has to give every possible reality space to breathe. Entertaining the intricacies like it’s my destiny.
One by one I place the boiling hot towels beneath a stream of cold tap water. After the rinse, I wring them out and stack them on the canning pot’s lid, a platter of wet, cotton blobs. I carry them this way down two flights of stairs to the dryer for their last adventure of the night.
Back upstairs, I pick up my phone again and read the job description.