Transformation by Jill Wilcox

The evening sun was glaring as I drifted into my apartment. I was greeted by the sound of running water. Had I left something on? That’s when I noticed the gigantic bulge in the ceiling. The white gypsum drywall swelled, like a mother about to give birth. The sound of running water was forceful and unrelenting, rushing towards me yet unseen— like my future. 

I watched, my mouth agape, as a firefighter swung an ax into the belly of the ceiling bulge. Filthy water gushed down onto the carpet, a gray waterfall flooded my studio apartment. Everything became putrid, soaked in moldy mildew water. My home was now unlivable, destroyed. I had nowhere to go and no clothes to wear! Every article of clothing I owned got soaked with rancid water. In a desperate attempt to save something from the flood, I hauled my heavy, wet clothes from the closet to the couch— as far away from the stinking waterfall as possible. 

The morning after the flood, I woke up in a cheap motel room to a ringing sound. My landlords’ voice was on the phone telling me the flood was caused by my neighbor upstairs: his water heater broke. Back at my soaked apartment, I thought about what terrible luck I had while I shoved all my clothes into black garbage bags and hauled them to the laundromat. I spent the entirety of the day there: rolls of quarters, little boxes of laundry soap, metal baskets on wheels, long plastic tables. A dryer buzzed loudly as I pressed my forehead against the cold window and gazed at the rain. The whole world is flooding. 

Then, I got the feeling that I was being watched. I looked through the glass and beyond the rain to see a familiar man looking back at me. He sauntered into the laundromat and dropped a large bag of clothes on the white tile floor. He’s tall and thin with green-olive eyes. He’s an acquaintance through friends— I had seen him at a few parties.

“Hey,” he said flatly. 

He recognized me too. 

After he started a machine, he sat down in a plastic chair next to me.

 “What have you been up to?” the man asked, eyebrows raised.

And then it all gushed out of me like the water in my apartment: I told him about the flood from the ceiling and how everything was wrecked and disgusting and moldy and soggy. I even talked about how I’d been wishing for change, and maybe this is it. The Universe works in mysterious ways, you know. I opened-up like never before— perhaps because I had nothing left to lose. We talked for hours over the slosh of washing machines and the tumble of dryers, over jeans, and socks, and shirts, and underwear. He asked me to dinner; and eighteen months later, I married the man from the laundromat.

Photo by Bianca Jordan on Unsplash