LAUNDROMAT LOVE LETTER:
to the biggest crush I’ve had in years
**Hi! I wrote the below last August 2022 as a newsletter I never sent out because I felt too bashful. I’m sending it now since it applies to this new format of Let It Out Lists… although I am still bashful…
My last serious relationship was years ago. It began in the fall, so by that Christmas it was still fresh. He gave me a gift, which I don’t remember, and a card which I do.
It was a folded piece of craft paper with a drawing of a penguin on the outside, and what felt like a love letter on the inside, although it was way too early to use that word. It was more of a like-letter, and honestly it wasn’t a letter at all—it was a list!
39 things he “liked” about me. Silly and specific in the way only someone who either has known you a long time or has been paying attention could write. I showed it to a friend who said, “oh he loves you.”
“Yeah right.” I said.
He didn’t technically love me yet, but my friend was right, he was about to.
Years later, in a spree of decluttering, I happened upon the like-letter tucked into an old notebook that made its way from Michigan, to New York, to California. Realizing all the chances I’d had to toss it and hadn’t, I questioned if I was a pathetic, nostalgic hoarder holding onto the past. Not wanting to open up a potential Pandora’s box of feelings midday, I tucked it back into the journal.
Later that night at the laundromat, I sat inside waiting for my clothes to dry. I usually go on a walk, once I toss them into the dryer, but the rare LA rain kept me inside that night. When my phone died, I begrudgingly pulled out the only thing left I had to occupy my time: blank pages. I’d brought the old journal I’d found earlier in my closet.
Then I heard someone yelling to get my attention.
“Hola! You dropped this outside!”
It was hard to hear what she was saying over the noise of telenovelas, the hum of washers, and conversations of the people using them.
“It is important,” she said, handing me a now slightly wet folded piece of craft paper with a penguin.
“Oh it’s not important… I mean um thank you,” I said, looking around as if she told me my zipper was undone. I tossed the like-letter into the blue Ikea bag waiting to catch warm laundry.
I thought about going to my car to dissociate by scrolling on my phone or eating chips rice cakes. Instead, I read the letter.
Its specificity made me feel as gooey as the first time. And reminded me of the euphoria of realizing a crush might like you back. It’s a temporary high, which is why it’s so alluring.
It’s an experience typically reserved in the media mostly for teens and younger adults. Of course, people fall in love at all ages, but not having experienced the early stages of it in my mid 30s, I wondered if the highs are as high? Or does the talk of mortgages and aching knees dull any sparks flying?
Mesmerized by my clothes circling the dryer, I got existential. Had I experienced those feelings for the last time? After a recent rejection, I wasn’t trying very hard to line up dates. But the letter made me want to, if it meant I’d get to feel that high again.
With a solid 45 minutes still left on the dryer, I opened up the old journal and this is what I wrote: a like-letter of my own.
It’s as gooey and sentimental as the one written about me. In a culture that feels allergic to earnestness and everything has to be diffused with a wink of sarcasm, it’s pretty cringe that I typed it up verbatim. But I did, so below is a like-letter-list to the biggest crush I’ve had in the last few years…
July 17, 2022
SoCal Wash & Fold Los Angeles, CA
I like when the purple trees bloom in early June. I like that it reminds me of how wild my first June here was.
I like the security person in the grocery store across the street from the laundromat who came up to me while I had headphones in to tell me I had a nice smile.
I like the soap operas that play in the laundromat all day and that Dexter usually meets me here.
I like that he was a stranger at a garage sale two years ago and now we’ve spent Christmas together and he tells me about his dates while we wait for our laundry each week.
I like that it won’t always be this way. I like it because I know he will start dating one of those girls, he’ll move in with her and they’ll probably have their own laundry, or maybe he’ll move back to Brooklyn.
I like that I won't have to pick him up from the airport in my Prius that he drives us back in.
I like how he complains every time he drives it, “it’s so hard to see in this car…”
I like that when I went to test drive it in Pasadena, three friends went with me and piled in while I drove us around the block.
I like that two out of the three were strangers when I landed here with one carry-on suitcase a few months before.
I like that Christine is the emergency contact in my phone and that she was the only person I knew when I got here.
I like that I slept until noon my first three days but on the third day, I rose before eight to meet her at the coffee shop around the corner.
I like that I kept meeting her there at eight until they closed it for a year.
I like that I moved into a house with friends of hers, strangers to me.
And that the strangers eventually turned into friends.
I like that in the midst of uncertainty and wildness, I shipped my boxes here from Brooklyn and basically haven’t left since.
I like that I was so sad to move out of the house with the strangers who became friends.
I like that one of the former strangers packed my boxes into his car and drove them down Ave 50 to an old school. And that we carried them up the stairs to a former classroom, now studio apartment.
I like that I went to a garage sale to buy a bike. And left with friends.
I like that I’d walk down the hill our house was on just to buy an Olipop so often that the owners of that shop offered me a job.
I like that when I was most isolated and lonely, bagging groceries at their shop felt like a party.
I like that I still work there and that my keys look like a custodian’s because of the friends and businesses who trust me with theirs.
I like that I take care of dozens of dogs.
I like that I bake cakes in an oven I bought from Richardo my first week living in the school and in my 200th week I still wave to him on the street.
I like the teen working on his green classic car with his dad next to my parking space. I like that I have a parking space.
I like staring out the window at the hill I walked up with the former strangers every morning at 7:00am that first wild summer.
I like that the coffee shop I met christine at the first week reopened and that meeting her there so early cured the depression I called jet lag.
I like that I still walk all the way to that coffee shop despite it taking triple the time it did from the house with strangers.
I like running into Captain there on Saturdays after he has acupuncture so he goes late like me. And that I know his acupuncturist’s name.
I like the guavas I eat on my walk every fall and the contraption that takes them from the tree to the basket with the sign that says, “FREE guavas”
I like the flower shop on the corner of Ave 57 that gave me a credit to use when I walk by.
I like that Sophie called me when she saw cops outside the old school when she drove by to make sure I was okay.
I like that I went to meet her at a party and even though she left early, I stayed because I ran into two friends inside.
I like to go buy toilet paper from Ali at the bodega late at night.
I like that he always compliments my wallet. And showed me his George Costanza-sized wallet and asked me if I thought it was too big.
I like how everyone talks about the thunderstorm the next day.
I like that Anthony gives me a hug like he hasn’t seen me in months every time I walk by his fruit cart, despite it being multiple times a day.
And that he knows my order since I went every day for a week when I couldn’t cut anything because I had hundreds of cactus barbs in my hands after falling on a hike.
I like that it feels like a small town that could be in a Hallmark movie sometimes.
I like it here. I hope I can stay.
August 12, 2023
That rainy day was a stressful one. I’d heard from my landlord that I had to move out of my apartment unexpectedly due to a complex situation with a neighbor. She had me go look at a similar-sized unit she’d relocate me to in a different neighborhood. After I looked at it I went to do laundry, which, as a productive procrastinator, I always do when I feel stuck.
It was disorienting, but in the end I was able to stay. Now, a year later, I’m about to leave that apartment, the former classroom. Just for a month, but that’s longer than I’ve left since I moved into it.
The longer I stay, the more comfortable I feel. This year, I’ve felt like everyone is coming or going, and I’m right were they left me. Leaving for a bit, I hope, will aid in my quest to not feel stagnant (i.e., here). The most growth in my life has come when I’ve been in a season of moving or traveling. The difference this time is that I’m looking forward to returning.
The other night Eli casually said to the group, “LA is weird, none of us will live here forever.”
I might, but none of us actually knows how long we’ll be anywhere. So rather than ruminate on who will go or stay, I’m attempting to be a spur-of-the-moment-plans person holistically.
We don’t know where anything leads—all of my friends I see often (with the exception of Christine) were strangers to me four years ago. If things had worked out with the person who wrote me the like-letter, or if I had stayed in the city I had always dreamed of living in… nothing on the list I wrote would’ve happened.
I’m not sure I feel the same awe about living here now as I did then. But I’m happy to have this sentimental snapshot to remind me of how I felt then. Maybe it was only because I was still in the novelty of a move? Or because the impending neighborhood relocation forced me to notice how connected I was to mine?
I don’t think the answers to those questions matter. Or if moving here was the “right” decision. I do believe that committing, instead of lingering in indecision, saves mental energy.
I now try to choose quickly because most big decisions, like to stay or to go, end up feeling correct in hindsight. Maybe because we optimistically try to contort the outcome into working for us, even if we’d choose differently given a Time Machine. Either way, finding good within the choice you made is a highly adaptive human ability and so is deciding to choose differently when necessary. We can do both. We will be okay I think.
Katie
PS.
This newsletter was meant to go out last year with Norma Kamali ‘s episode. I’m no Carrie Bradshaw and this isn’t a dating column, but in that episode Norma gave me some advice.
She said she’d “aged out of the dating or marriage market” by society’s standards, so she stopped trying. Then she told me those standards are bogus because at 65, she met her partner, and now at 75, they’re engaged. I wish I’d asked her if it still felt as sparkly as when she was young.
Instead, I asked her if after living alone for so long, she’d become rigid in her habits and routines. And therefore when she transitioned to sharing her life or cohabitating with someone again, was it bumpy to let all that go? I remember her saying something comforting like, “…honey for the right person you’ll be fine giving all that up.”
I wonder if that’s true…she doesn’t know just how often I eat dinner standing in the kitchen, or the plethora of other “secret single behaviors” I’ve developed since living alone. It’s embarrassing to admit to myself, much less here, but I hope she’s right, that there is actually someone—maybe even a few people—I like enough to spend time with more than being alone. And most importantly, that I get to experience the giddy moment when I first realize they might actually like me too.
NOW BACK TO ACTUAL TIME…
BELOW THE MOST RECENT EPISODE ….
#430 - The one where I cried mid interview… if you want to know what’s really going on with the podcast… listen to this episode …
“Deep Listening (Part 2/2) with Amelia Hruby, PhD, Host of Off The Grid & Founder of Softer Sounds Studio”
This week, writer and podcast producer Amelia Hruby is back for part 2. Last time we focused on one aspect of her work, leaving social media. This time we focused on podcasting, including how we both have used it to build connections, how we’ve seen the medium evolve, how she sees the future of the industry, how that’s impacted my experience as a midsize podcast, and much more.
You’re a gifted writer who somehow knows all our hearts. You validate all our innermost thoughts and feelings and ofc, all our secret single behavior.
This was such a pleasure to read. Love a good list and this one was so comforting.