The Carwash Essay
- Oct 30, 2025
- 7 min read
by M.M. Kaufman
It’s scary at first, but anything worth doing is hard. You gotta mind those tight curbs coming in. Maybe you’re so anxious you head to the exit instead of the entrance. Breathe. Get yourself to that teenage attendant. Let them guide you onto the track. Listen when they tell you to put your car in neutral. Let go of the wheel.
Don’t think about how many degrees you have and why it is so hard to let a sixteen-year-old tell you what to do. In situations like this, the teenager is smarter. You might say you weren’t that smart as a teenager, but I’ll bet you one thing — you were braver than you are now. You had no idea all the ways life can break you, and wouldn’t you give anything to have that ignorance back? You don’t have to give much, just your monthly subscription fee. There are payment levels for every budget.
For some people this is the easy part, the car is in neutral, your hands are off the wheel, no one can hear how loud you are blasting Chappell Roan, or Jeff Buckley, or classical music like a little freak. Because you are not a little freak in here. Here, in the carwash, you are safe. Until your car emerges from the tracks, and your existence is observed, you are both alive and dead simultaneously. You’ve become your own Schrödinger’s cat. Meow.
You can be anyone in the dark, especially the person you dreamed you’d become one day, and evidently didn’t. In the dark, no one is there to tell you you’ve never published a book, that you never got that PhD, that you’ll never lose those ten pounds, that you’ve never seen the Northern Lights, and that no one calls you Mama. Jets cover your windows in opaque foam hiding you from the world so you can be all that you never were. It’s three times the foaming action of — well that part is never clear, but you don’t care. As long as it keeps hiding you from even the cruelest voices in your head, you’ll keep coming.
Your car won’t come out the same car it went in, and neither will you. Like when you go to a theater early in the day, to see a movie that will temporarily change your personality, and when you emerge again, it is still light out and you wonder if this is the same day, if you are the same you. There is as likely a chance as not that under those giant wipe-o-matic’s you side-step into another reality. Maybe in this one you love yourself. At least in the reality that brought you here, you showed up for yourself. That’s a start.
You were not born a carwash-person or not a carwash-person. It is a practice like Buddhism, like playing the piano, like learning a second language. The younger you start, the easier it may come to you, but this life isn’t about making things easy. Unlike other practices, this one is not linear. You might find yourself in your early thirties, in the middle of the carwash cycle, and suddenly you can’t remember what gear the car is supposed to be in. Brake, right? Or you’ll lose control. No, maybe Drive so you have control. As long as you don’t cry when the teenager has to walk inside and scream over the machinery, “NEUTRAL!” Or fuck it. Cry all you want. You can do that in the carwash. No one, not even the teenager, will judge you.
Come every day. Come once a week. Come whenever you drive by and remember a holy place like this exists and wonder why you never think about it unless it’s right in front of you. Like an essay you’re writing about carwashes, it’s always waiting. Never calling out, but always ready to wheel you back in so you feel like you never left.
The carwash takes you in — covered in powdery, yellow pollen from Georgia’s spring, red sandy mud from Carolina country roads, white-lavender bird shit because you refill your feeders too often — and delivers you fresh and new. Your car is once again a blank page for the world to shit upon. But that’s your shit to go and find.
For others, such loss of control, walls closing in on every side of you, neon lights raking your body, thick suds covering every square inch of sight to the outside world — this is the terror. What if your car runs into the one in front of you, or the reverse? What if you’re the last car for his shift and the teenager forgets about you, shuts down the machine, the soap bubbles pop and the lights die out, and he heads home and you live here now, in the carwash.
There will be a moment when you don’t know if you’ll ever leave this world. The one you’ve created with your hooptie full of empty coffee cups, receipts crumpled in the cup holders for things you’ll never return, clothes bagged for the thrift store that you’ve left in the trunk for months. There is a smell in here that you can’t deodorize despite how many trees you hang from the rear view mirror. The smell is you.
One day, as the light finds you, as you emerge squeaky clean but still brokenhearted, you will have the urge to turn the wheel to the left, back to the beginning, and not to the right, to the street exit that leads to the rest of your life. Do it. Drive through again. The teenager loves you, better yet, he knows you. You’re his best, maybe his favorite customer since you got that monthly subscription.
Be careful of the days you wish the carwash would never stop. The world could forget you and you could forget the world: A fate we’re all destined for, come too soon. The carwash is not a fortune teller, but neither are you. You have no idea that you don’t still have something to offer. Even if it’s just a referral coupon, submit to tomorrow’s uncertainty.
You can’t find a therapist you like, who knows if insurance will keep covering your anxiety meds, and you really can’t afford to go to Japan to visit the lone phone booth in a field where you can call your dead loved ones. But you can afford a monthly subscription to the carwash. It pays for itself in two washes.
There are no replacements for therapists, SSRI’s, and conduits for speaking to the dead, but there is the carwash. Cry, scream, go ahead and do it, no one will see or hear you under the high-velocity air dryers. But maybe your aunt will, maybe your Dad will, maybe your friends will — yes, those ones that you pushed to a safe corner in the back of your mind. Because here, in the carwash, you are forgiven for all of the ways that you wronged them. The carwash absolves you of those sins — the way you avoided his glance the last time you saw him alive, the way you blindly believed she’d recover any day now, the way you resented taking care of him by yourself, the way you didn’t live up to her expectations.
And the vacuums — you’re not ready for the vacuums.
You just gotta get past that shitty first ride. The one where you sit alone with your aloneness and think you’ll never survive it. You will not understand how you can keep breathing but somehow you do and somehow the light returns and it beams brighter on you than ever, because the spot free rinse is worth it.
Soon enough, you will be planning your whole schedule around when you can go to the carwash. You will love those teenage attendants like the little brothers and sons you never had, but always wanted. You will research where the longest carwash is in the country (Texas) and how long it will take you to drive there (fifteen hours.)
It will be a comfort to know that somewhere 255 feet of conveyor is ready to take you on a five minute trip to another dimension. You dream of the person you could become during such a wash. Because at some point, you just can’t get clean enough.
Now, now you’re ready for the vacuums.
When you’re riding in the car wash, your vehicle is the only thing keeping you safe from the hot wax, the iridescent rainbow colored soap, and the giant spinning columns whipping mats back and forth. Somehow it is this and not driving in traffic everyday that helps you see your car for what it is — a safe harbor. But the vacuums offer no privacy like the carwash does.
Opening up the doors of your sanctuary to strangers, letting your sins spill out like trash, it’s not for the faint of heart. Your reckoning will be on display. This is a good thing, but it won’t feel like that. The community has to be present — you can’t heal in a vacuum.
Right when you think you’re spick and span inside and out, you question what clean even means. But you have time to figure that out. The carwash is always there and it is always waiting. For you. If you’re ever gonna make it, by any standards, especially your own, you have to get the monthly subscription. Sure, you may not go every day, but you have to set yourself up for all of life’s possibilities.
M.M. Kaufman is a writer based in Georgia. She is a Fulbright Scholar and earned an MFA in the University of New Orleans’ Creative Writing Workshop. She is the Managing Editor at Rejection Letters and a team member for Micro Podcast. Her fiction is published with Okay Donkey,The Normal School, Hobart, Metonym Journal, Sundog Lit, Daily Drunk Mag, (mac)ro(mic), HAD, Olney Magazine,Pine Hills Review, Maudlin House, jmww, Major 7th Magazine,Rejection Letters, JAKE, Icebreakers Lit,Identity Theory, and Pool Party Magazine. Find her on Twitter @mm_kaufman, Instagram @mmkaufman, her website mmkaufman.com, or at the carwash.
