The Bathtub

I’m in the bath, I hear my old house creaking, breathing, like it does not know it doesn’t have to. It hits me like a warm thunderstorm rolling past the type of town no one knew about, one full of rolling plains and old gas stations brimming with drunks who almost made it but never did. The ache is nameless and unknown, and I thought it would be easier to paint over it—with brittle brush strokes in the colour red—than to ever acknowledge it. I didn’t expect to ever feel it; life was alright before it, and I had never craved it in the ways that school girls would purr and squeal about. The body cannot crave what it never knew existed.

Love. Hot, feisty, never-ending, never-pleasing love. The type of love that hopeless romantics write poetry about. 

He came into the room so silently, like a lion hunting its prey, you wouldn’t know he was there until you were already in his trap. Caramel eyes and a dangerous smirk that I knew I’d never forget. He made me feel vulnerable, but also like I was a rat under a New York City subway, feeling the cart rumble over my body: never safe, always fleeting. I was small enough to know the cart would never scrape itself over my body—it would never expose my organs, bloody and gory, in a brutal display of butchery that any New Yorker would walk past without so much as a second look. But one wrong move and it could; tittering on the edge of that move was a high I spent many years chasing. It was foreign to me, to surrender my body, stomach up, like a dog whose only known to trust you, even when you kick it.

I was miserable and I loved every second of it.

Since you left, the bathtub has become my haven. You sat in here once with me, and I never felt more serene than that night; hazy neon lights flickering in the background, your hand in mine, our legs intertwined in a lover’s embrace. I didn’t know it—had never experienced it. And yet, in a life full of constant changes you were the only familiar setting I could ever remember. I’m afraid I will never get rid of you. You remain alive in fragments in the back of my mind. I don’t think of you often, but when I do, a shiver rattles my spine.

I wear your promise casted in silver around my neck, dangling above my breast in a statement of everlasting, but never satisfying, love. 

There are parts of the city that didn’t exist to me before you. Streets we fought on, fucked on, cried on. Intersections I cannot help but smile at the thought of you running with me in the rain, high as a kite, looking up at the sky as droplets found their way into our eyes. I never wanted to leave. If you had asked, I would have stopped time right then and there. We danced in the dark, too deathless for our own good, and I could have sworn in that moment we were Gods. It was pretend: a facade meant to cure each of our loneliness, and we thought it could fill us up.

You told me once it was easy with me, that you liked the way things were going. We laughed; I thought you meant it. You cut open a wound and left it bleeding on the carpet, but I let it stain. I felt so holy and yet so damned. After that, we didn’t talk about forever, or how it felt to hold me in your arms, and I no longer felt like my body was full of grace.

There was a moment back then when I thought Heaven would be lucky to have us. We’d arrive at the gates, hand in unlovable hand, before realising we were far too damned; we were not Gods, we were teenagers pretending to be adults, dressed up in mismatched socks with nothing to show except a game of pretend. I couldn’t recognize us that summer; we were the furthest thing from angels. 

The wine slides down my throat out of habit, habit for the feeling of not having to feel. As my body slinks down into the water, ripples covering my nipples like a cascading pour of caramel—like your eyes—and my head is underwater. I think of how it would feel to never come up, to surrender to a soft darkness. The thought of you not being there advises me against it. If I am to go, I still wish to enter the gates beside you, although I’ve given up on the idea of us being pure enough for heaven.

There is no time now to pretend—you left with no intention of return. A reality I must accept.

Head up, eyes open, warm water seeping around me suddenly feels like a room tightening its walls all around. Let me go, let me go, let me go. And I get out of the bath, and life goes on, and laughs are had, and smiles are remembered, and I'll even feel good—whole.

Until the next bath, then I will think of you again.