COLETTE DeDONATO

The Kindness of Laundromats

Hi. I noticed you from over there. I noticed you were reading an original copy of Love is Colder than Death. I noticed your red scarf with the little Tibetan symbols all over it. That is really cool. Do you know what they mean? I noticed you because your brow was all furrowed, like you were confused about something intellectual or anti-intellectual, sitting on that uncomfortable-looking chair, holding an ancient cocktail in your dreamscape. I noticed you were biting your post-structural nails, before when you were building little three-dimensional geometric shapes out of the wreckage of your delinquent subscription bills. I noticed that you didn't get in that dark green car when it pulled up in front and the lady inside, who looked kind of like an aristocratic non sequitur, asked you to. You're kind of selective about things. That's interesting. The first thing I noticed was your unsolicitous face and your soft iconoclastic eyes, and the way you delete all the incoming messages in your nonvolatile head. I like your malaproprist hair. It reminds me of a summer rain in Ronkonkama. But I noticed you just sitting here kind of pale and terse and apocalyptic. Do you live in this neighborhood? You kind of have this look on your face like you're on your way back from a bad movie or maybe you're just thinking about bad things like tyranny and real estate and diet sodas. I don't know, maybe you like diet sodas. You look like the kind of person who enjoys a good distopian cookbook or one of those ongoing classes that involves tripping, falling and breaking a valuable object and reacting to breaking a valuable object. You look like you might be a prisoner of museum benches, naysaying the glorification of tumescent dictators trying to circumvent the big black holes of their personalities with nebulous speeches and a pornographic afterlife. No offense. Actually, I don't mind scientists. I don't even mind pornography. I like to look at naked people. I like procedures that help to clarify the means of the first objective. You seem like someone who could really lose yourself in an enigmatic sense, like you could be all skyline and jump-start, not hiding behind your dialectic detours like some kind of spiritual sycophant. You seem kind of sensitive and primordial-peninsular even-with a modicum of truth-like syllogisms that you've laid to rest in the interest of being alive. You seem nice, like an outdated comic-strip character or a cymbalist. You don't seem like the kind of person who lets death obviate your truculent passions or creates some kind of polyamorous armory to exist in. I bet you don't even mind collapsing into that bathtub where you let the secular angels polish your hemispheric hands, until the night looks shiny and safe enough to wave back to. I noticed your dryer, the one with the irony-free T-shirt spinning in it, the blue one with the bittersweet stains on it, I think it ran out of quarters.

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