By Emma Shibley, For The Miami Student
The chatty, wide-eyed girl from the opposite end of our corridor is curled up on the couch, watching an episode of "Grey's Anatomy" on her laptop.
"My roommate always hates it when I paint my nails up there," she says, gesturing vaguely to her triple, tucked into the southwestern corner of the second floor.
The most unfailingly polite computer engineering major we've ever met sits at a table with homework out, jams blaring in his ears. He got to fight robots in a class this afternoon. Out of 10, he gives his day an 11.
And we are sitting in a television-less TV room across the table from him, unpacking our Jansport toolboxes - pencils instead of hammers, and textbooks instead of nails - finally ready to begin assignments that were due two days ago at a quarter after midnight.
We open our laptops - not for "Grey's," but to reserve a tab on the back burner for our emails. We are waiting for a message from the cryptic, indisputably omniscient MiamiIDAdmin.
"Web Laundry," the subject line reads. "Your Laundry Is Almost Complete."
Moments before, we'd taken the elevator downstairs, balancing our hampers on our hips and dragging them to the only room in that quiet hallway with an open door. We avoided unit six - it leaks. We glanced at the two students murmuring at the corner table and wondered if it was their deep blue, twin XL comforter hanging over a water pipe to dry.
Each piece of clothing we unball from the hamper, shake out and toss into the machine contains a moment of confession. The time we actually - just barely - peed ourselves laughing. When we wiped our palms on our thighs because our campus bathroom habitually never has paper towels.
We acknowledge spills ranging from red dwarfs to supernovas of coffee, beer and toothpaste with a bowed head and "namaste." Our clothes hold the micro dust of crumbs from every bite we took in the past week or so. Together, in a pile on top of the washer, they smell just faintly of sweat.
Individually, the seams of our clothes go into the machines smelling like cologne or perfume and deodorant. We wash away their wrinkles and stretched shapes. Our sweater sleeves have been softening at the cuffs, where we buff out the shine our sweaty palms leave on either side of our mousepads.
With a buck seventy-five, we undo that, too. We make the world a little more right again.
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In our pockets are gum wrappers, straw wrappers, the paper coverings of coffee stirrers. Sometimes a bit of change. Usually nothing new. The astronomically mundane. The stuff of legends.
We realize at the payment machine that we stumbled upon a free wash. Someone paid but never started a load. Unit one.
A guy from last semester's 8:30 walks in with a sheathed longsword, wearing a tie-dye shirt. He slowly starts a load and, before leaving, pauses a minute to watch it run. He's a Wednesday-night regular.
The quiet, sloshing hum of the washers is a welcome lullaby. Maybe we could fall asleep in here, we think. Some of us do.
As we check the time left on our chosen dryer, we imagine ourselves falling in love with another situational insomniac amid the stacks and the rhythms of these cycles.
We pause, wipe our eyes.
We are perusing our own private, gently clacking library.
Each machine is a book with an animated cover, the same three-second picture in a spinning motion until it repeats. And repeats. Each unit, one through 15, holds a week-or-so's narrative of honest secrets, dissolving softly among the foamy surfactants.
We feel humbled. We have been transiently freed from our burdens. Now, we decide to give them time to be cleansed in peace.
We amble back across the hall to the television-less room.
We text our least-judgmental friends and ask if anything strikes them about the community arising out of this accidental shared ritual, this unexpected basement mecca.
"It's either beautiful artistic people in the midst of struggles, or the crazies," they message back, drowsily forgetting the apostrophe in the beginning of their sentence.
"At least, that's what I've learned," they say. But they are not a late night launderer.
"Well, then," we reply. "We both know which one of those is me."
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