What Stays

I returned home and made for the shower. I began to clean myself. My fingers and toes hurt. It was cold outside, so they had grown numb. I made this mistake often. My extremities thawed under the warm water. They hurt, but this was not my issue. The real issue was that I would feel dirtier. As my toes got warmer, and I regained feeling in them, I would feel the itch. It would dance its way across my body. And while I had slathered soap on my body and my scrubbing was well underway, nothing could save one from the itch.

I thought this would subside. In my youth I had a fear of the ocean, and whatever lurked within it. My child mind only knew of one thing, sharks. When I would shower, I always held onto the possibility that a shark would emerge from the drain of the bath tub. That it would dive out with great speed and make its way for my face. This was why, to the ire of my mother, I would keep the bath curtain open. For if the shark emerged, I would jump out the tub, onto the bathroom floor, and through the bathroom door. When I washed my face, and as such had to close my eyes, I would picture myself underwater. The background would be dark, but I’d see a jellyfish, and it would illuminate just enough to spot the shark swimming to devour me. It never did, I would open my eyes quickly, sometimes quick enough for the sud on my forehead to fall into my eyes. But that was okay, for they did not hurt as much as the shark. For these reasons, showers in my youth were brief. A race against my own fear.

I am biding time for this to end. The sharks had only plagued me a year. Maybe slightly over. But this was my fourth year of such troubles. I had stopped playing hockey, as when I returned home, soggy and muddy from practice I could not take it. The walk back would pain me. My feet would squelch with my wet socks. And my legs would itch, but my fingers were far too numb to scratch them properly. The itch only made things worse. It conjured up imagery of dirty showers. Not typical dirt. The kind of dirt that had become one with the shower. That enough time had passed, that the dirt had settled. The gunk in the crevices. The black lining the rubber. The dirt and the shower could not be described apart from one another. To describe one would be to describe the other. There were days I could not leave the house for fear of the filth that lay beyond it. And while I lay on the corner of my bed, immobilised, I thought that was the one clean spot. That to roll onto my side would place the filth upon me.

One day, I may scrub till I drift down the drain alongside the bubbles and foam. I will whirl down the pipes, and while I will mix with the dirty water, or touch the filthy pipes, I will not be dirty.