The Pleasure of Water
What Died As Spousal Abuse Grew.
The feeling of taking a hot bath is something that I savor.
I love sinking into the bathtub, feeling water envelop my body.
The water casts off the world and the world becomes the tub. Everything disappears; time stops marching forward for the duration of the bath.
Serenity and a sense of pleasure embrace me.
I enjoyed baths like this for more than thirty years.
I remember the period in my life when this pleasure disappeared. Repeated baths, where I laid in the water baffled by the lack of sensation. I felt the water, but I lost the feeling of pleasure. Water was touching me, but my response to water was missing.
This was a major red flag of the many red flags, I saw them but I didn’t know what they meant and when I did know what they meant, I didn’t know how to respond.
If I were to look back, I think I had probably lost a lot of pleasure in various arenas in life, but the bath being a particular sense experience, I couldn’t help notice.
When I lost the sensation of pleasure in baths, I was married; life was extremely stressful. My days were explosions of crises. My life of being single, organized, having agency and order had been annihilated.
