Bathrooms
Cutting lines of powder, you were convinced was mostly eyeshadow anyways, on the edge of the sink with a credit card still linked to your parents account while impatient girls banged on the door. Feeling like a character in less than zero come to life.
I could tell that something was wrong and asked if you wanted to talk, retreating from the group and taking refuge behind a cheap composite door, under fluorescent light.
A hideaway for only our closest friends, or strangers we’d just met, to gossip and giggle, away from the party.
Leaned in towards the water spotted mirror, using my index fingernail to leverage a piece of food that’d been stuck between my teeth for who knows how long. How could nobody have told me! Maybe nobody noticed? Of course they noticed! I can never emerge, this is my new home now.
Where lovers convene, backs pushed into door knobs, and feet threaten to slip on the wet tile of shower floors; contorting yourself into shapes all those yoga classes were finally paying off for.
Running myself a bath after a long day, squinting at the ingredients list on the package of epsom salts my roommate kept below the sink wondering if it’d give me a uti. As I sit reclined, legs scrunched up, knees poking out above the surface of water that was gradually draining past the plug that wasn’t a snug fit.
If the kitchen is the heart of the home, then the bathroom is the kidney.
Where I perform my daily rituals, morning and night.
Where I come to paint my face with makeup, and where I come to take it all off again at the end of the day.
It’s where we become our most presentable. One last swipe of mascara, one last look in the mirror.
Where we’re often at our grossest. Fingers in places we’d never own up to, liquids of all viscosities escaping us.
Where I cut my legs shaving, and where I keep the first aid supplies to treat it. You can tell a lot about a person from what they keep in their medicine cabinet.
Standing in never-ending restroom lines, longer than the lines to get into the actual venue, with others and their designated attendants. Eliminate any breaks in potentially ravishing conversations (or at least have somebody to suffer through the holdup alongside) with the buddy system.
Once you’re up to bat, having made it through the excruciating wait, public lavatories prove themselves yet again to be the real horror shows. A choose your own adventure of stalls: pick between broken locks, clogged toilets, and seats covered in god knows what. Will you go for the squat-and-hover, or the cover-the-seat-with-as-much-one-ply-toilet-paper-as-possible-and-hope-for-the-best? Scratch that, there’s no toilet paper in sight. The soap dispensers are empty, and the hand dryers are broken. Though you still manage to snap a cute mirror pic for the socials, walk out, your head held high, the outside world completely oblivious to what battles you just conquered.
The community of bathrooms when there are no bathrooms. The girl code of “Come stand guard while I squat behind this tree”, and “Does this leaf look like poison ivy to you?” before using it in place of two-ply.
I’d known you for exactly 2 minutes and 33 seconds, enough time for you to slur out that my top was cute and you’d lost track of your friends, people I’d never heard of, before you were grabbing my hand, dragging me in to the powder room, and pulling down your pants.
Brushing your teeth with somebody, post sex, the first time you sleep over after they say “I think I have a spare toothbrush in here somewhere...”
Phone conversations with friends on speaker while you finish applying your eyeshadow. Your end on mute while you pee because you couldn’t hold it any longer, but don’t want the conversation to end just yet. Your head poked out between plastic shower curtains, phone pressed against your damp cheek, to convey the news that you were just invited to a threesome and are now midway through cleansing every nook and cranny of your body, and I simply must go, talk later darling ta ta!
We’ve all got our little bathroom ticks. Our weird routines. Things so rhythmic to us now, in these sacred sanctuaries, we don’t think twice about them. Conversations with ourselves in the mirror. Scrolling through the daily news during your morning shit.
The relationship with a bathroom is a casual one. Not somewhere you stay too long at a time, at least hope not to (you may want to see a doctor...), but know you’ll inevitably return to. If you added up all the time ever spent in bathrooms you’d come to realize they’ve in fact always been there for you, and always will. After those people stop macking in there at least, hurry it up there’s people waiting!