I believe still that love exists. Despite everything, I believe that it exists in a mother kissing her frightened child’s head in the middle of the night, I believe that it exists in a friend’s sacrifice of her night out to console instead, I believe that it exists in the bouquet on the widower’s grave, and I believe that it exists in the innate concern that leads us to other people at all. I, however unfortunately, do not believe that love is something that will ever be presented to me in an undiluted and permanent way.

The smell of clean laundry permeates the air, and over the loud music in my headphones, I can still hear the victorious and incessant beeping from the old arcade style Pac Man game in the corner two booths behind me. The man playing it is middle-aged and unshaved, very fat with a baseball cap and a Diet Coke, and he’s just feeding the machine quarter after quarter after quarter.

 I don’t know whether he’s winning or not. To my left, rows of big silver washers and dryers keep washing and drying while the woman running the laundromat bustles back and forth chubbily and cheerily sweeping the floor. She is a short, chubby white woman with a shaved head. She’s doing her own laundry at the same time she does her job. As I look around at signs that scream laundry propaganda at me in all capital letters, I wonder if the other people here feel the same way that I do. A young black man approaches me but speaks too quietly to hear.

“I can’t hear what you’re saying,” I tell him as I walk to the table he stands behind.

“You got an extra quarter? I forgot my wallet at home,” he says to me.

“Yeah, I probably do. Hold on a sec…” I find a dollar and a quarter in my bag that I’m probably not going to spend, so I give it to him.

He thanks me and walks over to the coin changer and gets four more quarters for the dollar, waits until he thinks I’m not looking, and he leaves the laundromat. How stealthy. Well, I think, that was mildly amusing. Hope he has fun with my dollar. An automatic door on the wall opposite me slides open and no one but the refreshing wind enters. My too-long bangs tickle my nose, and I begin to think about last night.

I was up so late, I don’t know how I’m still awake. I had to work at seven o’clock this morning, and I have trouble sleeping anyway, so my goal was to be in bed by 10:00. I was on the verge of success, but I just wanted to check up on some social networking before I laid down. The first thing I saw was a photo of the boy who had been my pseudo-seeing-someone for the previous eleven months making out with some trashy, dirty girl I went to high school with. Nauseous, I called my roommate into my room and told her “I think I’m going to throw up.” My first thought was Gross! Holy shit, I wonder how often this happens. Immediately subsequent to this thought was my realization that I was not actually with him, so I had no right to be possessive. Still, I was. Every time I even encountered another boy, he got upset; although afterwards, he always apologized and told me “I know we’re not dating so I can’t freak out.”

Okay. Okay, Andrea. Get a hold on yourself.

Some things are more shocking than actually painful. It’s a lot like falling off of your first bicycle. Holding the handlebars steady, you pedal pretty slowly, but it’s still an incredible feeling. The pressure on your right sole into the pedal, down and forward, now your left, and right again, back and forth — this is what’s holding you up on those impossible two wheels. Incredible! The breeze brushes your cheeks, pulled tight into a big smile, and you’re amazed that you’ve made it halfway down the block. Suddenly, you feel the handlebars wobbling slightly in your faulty grip, and the next sensation is the quick friction of the ground on your knees and a little sting in your palms. Hurt and embarrassed, you begin to cry. Your knees and your hands are bleeding a little, but as soon as your mother’s running feet reach you and her hands pull the bike back up off the ground, you’re okay again. She kisses your wounds and you realize that it actually didn’t hurt that much. The fall was not nearly as violent as you had originally thought. You were only startled.

That was me. When I saw that photo, I hit the ground fast, not hard. My roommate ended up confronting him about it instead, and by this time I had been hanging my head out the window into the night’s humid air, hoping the contents of my stomach wouldn’t explode onto the street forty feet below. Later, we talked on the phone until about two in the morning and I had no idea what to say. I had no idea what to do with myself. I could have cried. I did, a little.

“I never thought you liked me.”

These words stung in my throat; they were clumsy and hard to push off of my tongue: “Of course I like you.”

He told me for several minutes that he still cared about me, that he had always liked me. He told me he thought that the feeling wasn’t reciprocated because he had never met someone who showed such a lack of signs of being interested. I told him the opposite. I said, “Are you kidding?! You never even kissed me unless we were going to be having sex immediately afterwards. You didn’t even touch me outside of that. That feels insincere. So I apologize if I was ever stringent with my affections when I let you sleep in my bed, when you stayed and I made you food, or spent all of my time with you.”

“What do you mean by ‘stringent’?”

“Careful.”

“Maybe I was just nervous,” he argued.

“How?” My voice was hoarse. “I’m not intimidating.”

We talked in circles for forty-five minutes. In this time frame I suggested that I was too incompetent to be with anyone anyway, he told me this was untrue because I was “cute as fuck” and I said that that was not a valid reason for anything. The conversation ended with him, exasperated, “Well I don’t know what to do, because I like Chelsea. But I still like you like I always have! Tell me what to do.”

“I am not going to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do. You’re old and wise enough to act of your own convictions.”

“I’m torn,” he told me.

Now, so was I. He told me that when I briefly pursued someone else that he had been so sad that he wrote a song that he never showed to anyone. I was a muse. I inspired something, someone had wanted me, and now I had ruined it by being callous and inexpressive. This is so scary to me. I decided that nothing was going to change anyway, and I went to sleep with a very familiar feeling, and I think most people would call it “loneliness”, but it’s “homesickness” for me. Always, no matter where I am or what I am doing, I feel slightly displaced. Always nostalgic for where I stood in the previous second, I feel like there’s not a place that I can simply stop and belong to. I have moved so much and I am so restless, I’m homesick for a place or a person that I haven’t even seen yet. It’s a hollow, distant feeling that occupies the entire viscera, and it’s easy to ignore for the most part; but it’s as restless as I am, always persistent, pulling at the fabric of my mind until I’m frayed and soft at the edges.

Sitting in a laundromat alone at nineteen years old, washing this blanket again epitomizes this feeling.No one who ever slept under these threads belonged to me, and what’s worse, there were so many of them…

My contentment before last night might have been a place for me to belong, at least for a while. I don’t even know what that was. Now I feel like love would be inviting at first, but homely. As the blanket in the dryer tumbles, so do my thoughts. The man playing Pac-Man might not even be washing clothes, I realize. I wonder what he feels like. I wonder what it feels like to need a dollar, or to supervise a laundromat. I stand up stiffly from the hard seat of my booth and check that my blanket is dry and free of stains and bodily fluids. It is, but I put another quarter in and start the dryer again anyway. I have developed no conclusive thought.