New Towels

I still stand by the notion that hotel towels are weird. But I have also learned in the year and change since that particular realization that…new towels are a whole other Thing(tm).

That same partner type person has since transitioned from “person I spent a few naked weekends with” to “Primary Partner who Has A Drawer In My Dresser”. At one point we had The Talk.

The “are we in a place to talk about living together?” Talk.
Spoiler Alert:: No, we were not right now. And that is OK.

In that time of shifting and evolving and change…my roommate moved out and he moved out of a place and onto a new chapter in life and I was doing the clean and purge that comes with staying in the same apartment but needing to accommodate new roommates and routines. Things were in shambles and I had no real control over other people’s load out logistics and I was kind of a mess.

So I dealt with it in the only* way I knew how — I went shopping. (*I have other coping mechanisms. This just happened to coincide enough with my birthday that I had some gift cards to use and could Nest)

One of the first things I did was go thru and get rid of every towel that was tye-died in every colour my hair has been since probably before college, or that had been bleached on and worn thru in places.

For the first time in my life, I was looking at getting a matching set of towels instead of the collection of ones I got along the way cause I needed one or had taken in secret from my parents’ house when I moved out way back when.

Also for the first time in my life…I found myself thinking that someone else would be using them and factoring in what they would also want the towels to be.

I do not know why I thought it would make a difference? J has been showering in my house for over a year at this point and the miscellaneous towels had worked just fine.

They got everyone just as dry and caught just as much spilled wine (and various other fluids, lets be real) as whatever else I was going to buy…so why did this feel so important? Why did this feel like a relationship Milestone, and not just “I am able to replace these, so why not make them Nice?”

I do not really have an answer for these or any of the other questions that popped up for me, but I think part of it boils down to:: for the first time in my life I was Stable Enough to be considering any of these things…and that was it’s own sort of Milestone.

I did not need the Target gift card from my Gran to buy groceries and could use it for other less essential needs.
I did not need to not care what someone else thought of my towels because they were probably not going to be around very much or very long.
I am building out what I want my life to be or to look like, and someone else is a part of that now.

We did not put them on a registry. They don’t have bougie thread counts. They arent Fancy. They are rather unremarkable, to be honest. They aren’t even monogrammed. They just all match. We each have a bath sheet, and I still have the one rose gold towel for my hair that I got for $3 at Marshalls when I had to emergency move out of a terrible situation a while back…but they are still mostly Just Towels.

It is still not about the towels. It is just still weird.

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