Laundrophobia.

I first realized I had a problem when Julien came home one day to find me carefully navigating the dripping stalactites of wet clothing hanging from every available surface in our bathroom, bedroom, and kitchenette in order to move freely about the apartment.

The rabbits were being terrorized by mysterious droplets of water coming from the Heavens above their little abode and splashing right on their little bunny butts unexpectedly, causing them to leap into the air and then scatter. They huddled under tables and inside their little grass huts and watched helplessly, confused by this water coming from the sky. It was their version of a locust plague, and I'm sure at least one of them is a devout believer in Bunny Jesus after the incident where a pair of soaking wet pants came splatting down into their enclosure.

In an attempt to avoid the laundromat, I had washed every article of clothing in our laundry basket in the actual bath tub, like a confused 1930s washerwoman, and then hung them out to dry with the aid of neither clothesline nor outdoor air. I had been intimidated earlier by the wide array of clothes-drying products in the local hardware store, and thus neglected to buy any lest the hardware store guy think I was stupid or something. Likewise, I didn't want our neighbors seeing me putting out clothes on the fire escape like an idiot, so our wet clothes hung in our apartment for a few days, while I, forcefully cheerful, insisted that they'll surely be dry any day now.

In the winter, I would wash my underwear in the sink under the guise of it being delicate and the label clearly said to hand-wash. Hanging it, along with some socks and slips and shirts that I included "because I was already doing a wash" on my little mini drying rack and setting it in front of the radiator with a space heater running next to it worked perfectly for me. Julien did a bigger wash on weekends, to avoid my "helping" him with some of his clothes, while I cowered in the apartment, opening and closing the wash-pins I'd bought because I'd seen them at my grandma's house before and knew how they worked.

This isn't an issue with washing clothes. I've done my own wash since I taught myself as a really young girl, after an unfortunate incident where the one pair of pants I owned and wore every day got so big from over-wearing that couldn't keep them up at my waist and I simply had to wash them. But I didn't know how, so I just sprayed them with an ungodly amount of Febreeze that I'd found and dried them with a hair dryer, so that all day people around me were asking what smelled like someone urinated on dryer sheets. It was me. I smelled like that.

It's partly a problem with my current neighborhood. When we moved in and I was carrying a heavy something from the subway to the apartment, I had a man come up behind me and whisper "don't drop it, don't drop it" in my ear as he followed me for a block. I'm harassed on the street daily, to the point where if I don't have to leave the apartment for anything very important, I just don't.

But mostly it's an issue I've always had when I have to do "normal people things". I've always been an alien, and so there are times, almost every day, when I just feel like an impostor masquerading in a human body, and it's always in the most banal situations. Throw a woman pooping into a bag on the subway at me, and I am cool as a cucumber. Tell me to organize a ragtag team of artists to stand on the street and sell pick-up lines for twenty-five cents, and I'm in my element. I have photos to prove it. Ask me to yell at some bastard on the street, and you will find no better person. Make me do some grocery shopping, and you might as well have sentenced me to death. I will avoid it until I am literally sucking on crackers to make them last all day. I'm a creative person because I've had to discover how to use the resources that I have instead of going to the Rite-Aid, in front of everyone, to purchase what I need. I get nervous poops when shopping for kitchenware, like at any moment my skin is just going to unravel and I'll be exposed for the lizard-person I am.

I've since conquered grocery shopping because of the bunny rabbits (they need to eat every day, apparently) and Julien (I can't just feed him lettuce, apparently) and because I would be dead by now if I hadn't. Also, I can do it after hours, far from the watchful gaze of daytime people. Similarly, I've moved on from carrying all my money bundled in a pink Disney Princess wallet to putting it in a banking institution, which I attend regularly in the dead of night to use the ATMs when no one can see me. I can even order at Starbucks, although I'm somehow still bad at it.

But anything that I can secretly do in the privacy of my own home without having to expose my dirty laundry to the world, I will go way out of my way to do, hiding from normal people who don't even have to think once about their daily routines, while I'm still just the troll living under a bridge. I live there because I can do my laundry in the river.