It's only when I drive off to do laundry that I realize the value of what I wear. Only then do I notice the frayed ends, the strands of elastic dangling from cheap cotton underwear overwashed from the summer months of ass-sweating.
The used clothes I've inherited, the socks and shirts faded in their overtime of mechanized cleansing. All my miniature, helpless uniforms of
personality.
Folding my clothes just feels embarassing, as though I am some homeless orphan ironing out rags for my own pride. The crispness of my formerly soft and contoured shirts makes them seem new, but only for a time. This is the part where I don't feel bohemian, where I am not proud, I'm just poor. Too poor to own anything nice, or to wear what nice things I own often enough to wash them. But, I would say that having these, clean and dry, springs forth more confidence than they did in their former state, that of a pile in the bathroom, moist with the sweat of all the terrible summer runnings, moist to the touch with the South.
And even then it seems the lesser of two evils.