Allison's Archives

I stand before the bathroom sink like it’s my altar. I am this close to kneeling. I’ve been thinking about religion a lot these few months. I’ve been thinking about having something to believe in, having someone forgiving. My bathroom echoes like a cathedral; good for karaoke, better for confessions.

I stand before the bathroom sink trying to wash the blood out of my bedsheets, trying to wash out the proof of my humanness. I don’t want to hand my loss over to a machine. I want to feel it running through my fingers. Lately, my life has painfully stopped being mine. The only thing that is mine is this pain in my chest that blooms with spring. Curious, since the sun no longer pierces through me with its warmth like it used to.

Scrubbing takes a while. Stains and dirt are stubborn clingers and so am I. I cling onto my expectation that people can be better despite consistently being proven otherwise. I cling onto the belief that it is my job to clean up after others, as well as the belief that they will one day realize it and have gratitude bloom in their chest. I think about all the laundry I’ve done—metaphorically and otherwise. My hands more soap than skin. Since when did cleaning up after myself prove insufficient? Since when did my worth become measured by my ability to clean up after someone else without want for gratitude and without complaint? I think about how gratitude is particularly selective and scarce from people who claim to practice it and keep a journal of it all. Still, I clean. Still, I put elbow grease into this life. Still, I try to understand people who refuse to help themselves at the cost of my own sanity, at the reckoning of my own peace. I, a stubborn woman, continue to scrub a stubborn stain out of existence. I fear someone else is also trying to scrub me out of existence. My arm tires. I can’t stop. I can’t fail.

Eventually the stain gives way. The evidence of my loss becomes a memory. Faint, transient, personal. So personal. I step into the shower. I wash my hair and go to war with myself. I think a scalding temperature is the solution to my problems but I end up turning it to warm anyway. I’m not meant for extremes. My mother isn’t here to wash my hair like she did when I was five, making sure the shampoo doesn’t get in my eyes. My father isn’t here to hold my hand like he did when I was five, making sure the evils of this world don’t get to my soul. I need to work through things on my own and I do it in the shower. So personal. I’m in my philosophy classical logic lecture again. If I were stupider and more incompetent, then I would be happier in life. If my eyes didn’t naturally drift to things that are wrong in my world, then I would not be as anxious. If I had not believed that life held more for me, then I would be content. But I am neither stupid nor incompetent. My eyes do indeed betray me as they search for mistakes that could have been avoided in the first place. And I truly believe that life holds more for me. Therefore, I am unhappy, anxious, and discontent. The shower washes away any dirt on my skin but does not succeed at washing away what clings to my insides. I sigh and it disappears into the steam. Sometimes I imagine if I were to fall in this shower, no one would notice for weeks. I’ve been falling anyway. No one has noticed.

I step out of the shower and onto the mat. My back continues to carry the imprint of other people’s footsteps. I wonder if it will fade with time. My organs have already been squished out of their usual homes and perhaps that’s why I always feel my heart in my stomach. I dry myself off, not forgetting my back, and the cold hits me all at once. I tell M that I feel like giving up some days and M asks me to shut up (affectionately). I tell W about what plagues me and W gives me actionable solutions. I tell K I’ve been thinking about going home where I can drown my problems in the water around the island and K almost says nothing; K holds me and it’s all he can do. Most of my friends think I’m okay. Typically, they are always right; this time, they are gravely mistaken.

I put a medley of creams and serums on my face as if I won’t be crying them all away. I see both my mother and my father in the mirror and I think maybe it won’t be too bad to see them every day. The option always exists. An easier, pain-free, more humid path always exists for me. But I’m too exhausted to walk. In too much pain to travel.

I scream for help in my bathroom, at my altar. The scream, like all my prayers, gets flushed down the drain. I close the bathroom door behind me and pretend to be someone who is alright. There are things to do. Dishes to wash. Prayers to mouth. Sheets to dry.

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_{The accompanying image (La salle de bain by Pierre Bonnard, 1932) serves only as a visual complement to the essay and carries no interpretive or illustrative claim beyond that.}