We’re getting ready to go out with our friends, a nice couple going through a hard time but making the best of things. They’ve been our only consistent friends around here since we met a few years ago, not long after my wife and I moved to this blue ridge mountain college town.
They deserve a good life, something better than what they’ve had, we all do, and I’ve made a promise that if life presents a way I will take full advantage of it and give us all a nicer life.
I hop in the shower after trimming my beard down to a lined up stubble and giving the stray hairs around my ears a quick touch up. Some patches of white have started to take hold around my temples, spreading like new moss on a freshly fallen log. My grandfather had a full head of white hair in his 30’s, so I guess at 29 I’m right on track. At least I’m not going bald like my dad and uncle. It looks like I got one good gene outta that side of the family.
Sjoukje joins me and adds aroma soap to the tub, stopping up the drain as the steam from the shower fills with lavender, bubbles rising around our ankles. She’s in a great mood and it’s nice to see her smiling so much lately. Shampooing her hair and making happy noises about how good the water feels, small talk neither of us remember even as we’re saying it but not out of disinterest in each other, just because the words mean nothing more than the moment they belong to.
“Switch!” She gives the command and slides past, her ass gliding across my thigh on her way to the dry side of the shower to scrub up her body.
I wash my hair, scrub my face with some beaded soap and suds up my body in almost one motion then just stand there letting the water pound over my shoulders and back, working out knots from a week of bending over notebook and laptop with bad posture.
Her hand taps my shoulder and she hums an insistent “move!” noise through face wash drifting over pursed lips, eyes squinted tightly, scrunched up button nose braced for the blast of water on its way as soon as I get the fuck out of the way.
I step to the side, up against the tan vinyl shower wall, splattered like a Pollock with blue hair dye months old, slowly fading a little more every time we get in here. Dying my hair stopped when I started working from home and stopped going outside so much and sweatpants just kinda became my regular pants.
“You can probably drain it now.” Sjoukje said after she’d sputtered and scrubbed under the steaming stream for a minute, getting every inch of her lovely face sparkling clean. The water had reached most of the way to our knees. I barely noticed the body temperature puddle of gray flat bubbles we were wading through and wouldn’t have until it overflowed. Quickly the ashy colored water went down, just a few lavender bubbles clinging stubbornly to the side of the tub.
She got out and made sure to keep the shower curtain as closed as she could so as not to unleash the frigid winds onto my poor wet nudity. That’s how you know when someone loves you, little shit like that.
I crank up the heat until it’s almost as hot as it goes and curl up on the floor of the tub while she dries herself quickly in the chill fall air. We’ve left the bedroom window open and the leaves crash like ocean surf in rolling mountain winds.
“It’s time for my water prayers.” I joke to Sjoukje as she’s getting her toner and moisturizer applied.
I put my back to the blast and take the full weight and heat of the water, stinging along my spine like a comforting flagellation. Water prayers was a joke, but really this is as close as I get to prayers now. With the roar of water on the backs of my ears drowning out the onslaught of “5 radios changing stations all the time” that I usually hear in my head, I can see my memories and feel what needs to be felt about them.
This time my prayers bring me a vision of all the showers I’ve been in up until now, each one a prayer of its own leading me through hell to all that I forget is so good, like this prayer will lead to another… and on… they go.
The shower in my parent’s house as a kid, racing toy cars up the back slope of the robin’s egg blue plastic floor to ceiling tub. It had two shower heads, the second installed by dad so him and his 18 year old second wife could shower together more comfortably, but he got lazy/broke partway through and instead of a metal plate around the hole cut in the wall for the shower handle we had a Planter’s peanut tin lid.
There was the first shower with another person, my first girlfriend. Too young to be dating by the standards of the church and our families we hid away in a house I was watching for some friends of ours. She spent the night and we figured out what it was the church was so scared of us knowing. The next morning we showered off in the mostly bare spare bathroom, just a 3–1 soap that we used most of just because of how it felt to rub soap on another person.
The shower at Urban Ministries that had a timer on it and you got 10 minutes of water, 15 minutes bathroom time total. Under my flip flops I could never tell if the floor was dirty or if it was the texture of the concrete that made it so gritty, like a beach side rinse off stall. I never wanted to be completely naked there, it never felt safe even with a lock on the door. But I did strip down to just my flip flops once a week when I was quick enough to get on the list for the 2 hours a day they opened the showers, just so I could get the road grime, cigarette smoke and dirt sleeping grit off from me for a little while.
Sjoukje leaned in and felt the water, it had started to cool and she turned the knob a few hairs to the left, rekindling the lashing.
There was that miserable banana yellow shower after the couple I was hanging out with said I could stay and drink in their motel room that night, if I let the big guy suck my dick while they fucked. I didn’t want to but I wanted to sleep inside so badly, to shower, eat some shitty fast food in air conditioning, drink a 40 of malt liquor and smoke a blunt with the TV playing some Discovery channel bullshit, maybe that’d for just one night make this feel like some vacation adventure instead of my real life. Some fucked up all inclusive paid package deal, “Come experience the modern American fever dream firsthand”. After they had filled the room with the smell of anal and my dick was flat and finally left alone, I drank enough to not remember much from the shower except how the fan drowned out their fighting and I thought about just sleeping in there.
That roach and earwig filled shower in the run down house by the corner store, the store where that guy from our block got shot and died. I’d go to the corner store and pick up blunt wraps, a heat lamp burger and some beers, come home and quickly rinse off the crust from my landscaping job in the tepid water that barely eeked from the cracked plastic shower head. If there were bugs in the shower I’d just rinse off in the sink. It was better than nothing but barely.
Dozens more showers flashed by my closed eyes, the feeling of each one seeping into me and filling me up with my life so far. Sometimes I forget that I’ve lived anything except the moment I’m in, I forget that I’m a whole damn person with a right to be here where I am, a right to speak and move through this reality and create.
The hot water starts to run out and my visions slow down with it, I uncurl my body and brace myself against the wall to stand, twisted back complaining but complying. Time to go outside, time to be social and live life like I’m in my 20s still. It’s time to live like I’m here because of those showers instead of in spite of them.
