Presidential elections and laundry rooms

In the days leading up to the presidential election, I remember telling friends that I could not picture either candidate winning. In my mind, I could not draw an image beyond our current reality. I, and perhaps others too, existed in an in-between space. We were all holding our breath. I did not know if this signified my inability to escape the present or I simply had no history to base the national political future off of. Every four years, I am told that this will be the most consequential election of my life.

Election night, we hung a white sheet above my roommate’s bed and projected news coverage from her bookshelf and attempted to complete homework and ate candy. The night reminded me of a letter I read in American Girl Magazine in elementary school. In it, a girl my age wrote about her desire to become our country’s first female president. A year later, our teacher simplified the upcoming 2016 election for the class. That week, in fifth grade, I felt bad for the girl who had written the letter; she had been too late, I had thought.

This year, curled on the carpet between friends, attempting to finish my reading before the dorm room devolved to entropy, I could not picture the future, could not grasp it in my palms. Still, I thought that maybe, somewhere in this country of nine-to-fives and dinners spent by the television, a girl tucked between the crevices of a stained couch reading American Girl Magazine would find a sparkle of hope. I invited a friend to come join. “What is there to watch? She already lost hours ago,” he replied. At 10 p.m., we changed the screen to “Superbad.” Minutes later, Michael Cera began discussing pornography, and I left to sit in the laundry room.

In college, I have started sitting in the laundry room — to work, to debrief with friends, to think — even, and especially, when I am not actively washing my laundry. I find safety in the dichotomy between the constancy of the lost socks and empty tide pod bags in the corner and the perpetual churning and changing of washers and dryers. I think there must be some man made beauty in the machines, in the way they circle around like clocks, in the cycle and how it stops and a new stranger comes in and it begins again. That night, I did not think much. I sat and pressed the side of my head against the dryer, listening to it thump like a heartbeat.

The next morning, our “Why College?” professor instructed us to do nothing for 20 minutes. I sat in the middle of the oval, staring at people bike past. A young girl asked me if I was okay. I said I was. She said, “I hope you feel better soon.” It struck me: how odd it is to do nothing in this world of always something. In my mind, though, I was still in the laundry room, still watching the clothing circle through the dryer, still inhaling the plastic cleanliness of laundry detergent as my teacher droned on about doing nothing and its importance.

I saw a quote on a friend’s Instagram story that day: “It’s a privilege to not care about politics.” Beyond the irony of a quote on authentic political engagement spreading through the performative tokenism and self image construction of social media activism, I found resonance in the highlighting of different perspectives on public policy concern. I had the privilege of separating my life into distinct categories: the tangible and the intangible. In our dorm room, gathered around a white bed sheet pegged to the wall, eating Trader Joe’s peanut butter cups, the election was just as much a spectacle as it was a national event. When the event was no longer entertaining so much as it was depressing, we could turn on “Superbad” instead. When Michael Cera began making sex jokes, I could escape to the laundry room; I could watch the clothing churn.

In class, after doing nothing for 20 minutes, we analyzed the world not on personal terms, but on critical, intellectual terms. We debated as though we were in a high school debate tournament. Even now, as I write this, I have the privilege of thinking first and feeling second, of attempting to produce a coherent string of words and not just a jumble of emotional terror. I have the privilege of considering current events from an academic perspective: what about the numbers, the data, what do “the experts” have to say? In this four walled world filled with palm trees and red tiling, one can almost forget all that lies outside.

A day later, in a class on feminist backlash, our professor advised us to get IUDs and stock up on Plan B. We discussed Josseli Barnica, who died of sepsis in Texas after being told that the hospital could not intervene in her miscarriage without risking prosecution, and Amber Thurman, who died from an easily curable infection under a Georgia abortion ban because doctors were fearful to perform a D&C. Barnica left behind a one year old daughter, Thurman, a six year old son. I watched as the walls to our palm tree world broke down, as the luxury of intellectualizing evaporated. I was no longer in the laundry room listening to the machines cycle on. The statement bridged the intangible with the tangible; suddenly, the abstract felt concrete. Politics was no longer men with monotone voices and impossibly symmetrical women droning on from a white bed sheet. It was here, now: in our classroom, in my body.

Had it not been for that bridge, for the collapsing of the walls of our world into all that lies beyond, for blending of the line between my body and the policies that police it, I might have used the laundry room as a metaphor. “We have endured an election,” I might have written, “but there is always laundry to do, but there is always another stained T-shirt to wash, but there is always a pile of lost socks in the corner. The machine keeps cycling, keeps churning, cleansing, tossing, keeps wringing its contents dry.” The machine keeps cycling, but not for three mismatched, abandoned socks and a stained T-shirt in the corner. The machine keeps cycling but not for a woman lying in a hospital room in Georgia, blood pressure sinking, organs giving out, waiting for her fever to climb high enough, for her bleeding to grow grave enough to justify operation. “Promise me you’ll take care of my son,” she told her mother, before entering the room.

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