It’s 1 p.m. I’m in New Mexico or New Zealand or New Brunswick. But nothing is new. Everything is old and everyone is smelly and the paint is literally and figuratively chipping. I’m in a laundromat. My phone is charging in a locker during the wash, so I stare into the laundromat, and think of the places that I’ve been on this trip. 

The washing machine spits out Brunswick, maybe 10 minutes into the cycle. As I stare into the washing machine, that’s it, I’m in Brunswick. My body was wearing black under a grey sky, grey buildings and grey bike racks and white-grey sidewalks that lead from the grocery store to Sydney Road, Sydney Road to the hostel. 

I don’t remember the name of the grocery store. I can’t remember if I encoded this memory while leaving the grocery store to cook the Sunday roast, to buy emergency hangover Paracetamol, or to make a routine run when my routine was based in Melbourne, Australia. Which was it? Why this grocery store run? 

Silly, selfish memory. Make way for the good stuff, hey? Formal attire, please. 

Before I took on the thankless job of staring into this washing machine, I told myself I’d read. My copy of Tibetan Peach Pie is lying open next to me with highlighted names and notes. Behind a bright pink curtain is the name Barnett Newman. Robbins mentioned the success that Barnett Newman had exploring vertical lines. 

Between my visits to the Tate Modern and the MOMA, I could bet that I’ve taken in the visual stimuli that comes from Newman’s work. I might have stood directly in front of one of his vertical masterpieces, scanned horizontally to take in the name of the artist, and contemplated the effects of his looming lines.

But I put those clothes back on the rack.

Or maybe I wrote his name down in my notebook, optimistically believing that in the midst of plane rides, train rides, insurance payments, cousins’ birthday parties, crying, building blanket forts, and picking up emergency hangover Paracetamol, I would look Newman’s name up and stuff more seemingly productive knowledge about modernism into my head. 

My notes from the Tate Modern serve as a prologue to the notes in my Europe notebook. My Europe notebook is sitting below my notebook from my time in Australia is sitting below my Southeast Asia notebook. They’re in a bin, next to incense and mugs and towels and all the souvenirs I bought and DIY souvenirs I collected. 

When I’m in my new apartment, I plan on hanging all of these souvenirs off of mini clothespins, but not the clear, pink mini clothespins that I saw at Target earlier, mini wooden clothespins that would hold my memories as I take them out of the washing machine of my memories.

One of the souvenirs waiting in the wash comes from a temple in Malaysia. Like the grocery store in Brunswick, the name never made it in with the detergent. I spent my afternoon at this temple with people whose names must have ended up in the dryer lint must have ended up in the bin. The temple was beautiful, but that’s not what arrived in my mind as I sat in meditation.

It was the gift shop. 

The gift shop sat at the base of a cable car. Remembering one single gift shop in Malaysia is an accomplishment. Trying to remember everything that this gift shop sold would be impossible, so the whole operation is…a wash. 

But I have another few minutes before the clothes are ready for the dryer. 

Snow globes, definitely. Spatulas, the rubber kind. I don’t think they had patches but they had a backpacks. Everything was inanimate, wrapped in plastic. So much plastic. Crinkly plastic notebooks, crinkly plastic keychains. Crinkly plastic magnets, crinkly plastic posters. 

I don’t remember every item in this gift shop, but I remember the feeling that I was witnessing infinity. The rows of souvenirs and household items, wrapped in rows of plastic, touched by rows of hands feeding rows of families, using their fingers to tap rows of keyboards to friends and colleagues and strangers, with their own washing machine set of memories – 

What I’m trying to say is that there are a lot of things that I can recall. Long-term memory storage is unlimited. There are a lot of grocery stores in Melbourne. There are more artists featured in the MOMA than clothes in my wardrobe. There are a lot of gifts to buy in Malaysia.

But as my clothes became fluffy in the dryer, I scrolled through my phone. I stopped on an Instagram that asked me to think of one thing that made me happy. 

And of all of the snow globes I could have shook, the places I could have gone, and the clothes I could have taken off the drying rack, all I can think of is you.