This is why I’m here. A rainy Sunday in the early days of October. A stylish hole-in-the-wall coffee shop in the Lower East Side, the best neighborhood in the world, in my humble opinion.

Across the road are walls of rain-soaked brick, both red and white. Above me are swaying, glistening green trees, happy and nourished.

I have nowhere else to be.

Working hard makes me appreciate the time to lean against this graffitied wall and watching life go by. There’s nothing I love more. Hot coffee. Nutty and delicious. A rainy fall day, with nothing to do but play.

After coffee, I head to the laundromat to pick up my laundry.

The laundromat is quiet, and the woman who runs the shop is exactly like the grandma in Mulan. Missing teeth, sprightly like a grasshopper. She’s near the back, pulling clothes from a dryer.

She looks up and notices me, smiling. “Okay!” She hurries to the front of the shop, sort of grunting. She has short gray hair and stands at about five feet tall. She’s sturdy, scrappy, and makes me laugh.

She takes my laundry bag and weighs it on the scale, then writes the receipt. “Tomorrow,” she says. I pay, and she sometimes tries to find something to give me in return, like a warm sparkling water or a little chupacabra keychain, or a mandarin.

Last time, she gave me a mooncake. My favorite thing. Perfect for a rainy day. I think it was near or on the autumn solstice.

How does she do it, day in and day out—people’s laundry? Because there’s a flow to the shop, to life.

She’s smiling, she’s working, there’s a teenager in there often working, like he was today, and there’s a man, perhaps her son. They’re together. They all seem pretty happy, as the man makes small talk with me and laughs, and the kid is sincere. He’s there.

Maybe the key to life is being able to enjoy the small, insignificant things, over and over—the smell of the detergent, or the fresh hot clothes, crisp from the dryer, or the customers who make you think, or laugh.

She and her coworker sometimes say a few things to each other when I’m there, smiling, and I don’t know what they’re saying, but I just laugh. It’s laundry. I enjoy going in there. One time the woman told me her name was Mae when I asked. But then another time, I said Mae a few times and she didn’t reply. Who knows.

Life is a laundromat. We’re sojourners on this planet, just passing through. A laundromat should be a miraculous thing, but just because we know what it is, it isn’t. But it is. A laundromat, the shining sun, the rain, the clouds, a cup of coffee, music in our ears, in a city, any city, but I’m damn grateful to be in NYC.

Days like this remind me of who I am. I look around my apartment, the color, the comfort, the plants, and I glimpse my evolution. I got a small white pumpkin and a cinnamon witches broom from Trader Joes. At my core, it’s clear that I’m Vinny. Always been me.

Whoever sees through these eyes, whoever’s in there. Consciousness. Energy that fills from days like today. I hope to make every day like this, but it’s not always easy, and that’s okay. Just appreciate how good it is right now. In exactly the right place. With exactly the right experiences. To be who I am. What more could I ask for, when this is already a dream within a dream?