Shower Thoughts

I knew it was night because the glow of parking breaks illuminated the interior of my car with a panicky red haze.  Click, click, click. My left turn signal gave the impression of a clock counting down and anxiety, as it always does, bubbled through my chest and to my limbs like I was falling.

I looked up from the floor and a car was in front of me. No one was in it. Its lights were off. Yet I knew I had to make this left turn. More anxiety bubbling by the second, my radio turned from music to noise and I tried to turn it down but it only got louder. So loud in fact that I worried it was going to wake my parents up.

Probably 3:00am, and this heavy Pixies song was blasting through the house while I lay on the couch. How the music began, I did not know, but nevertheless, I should turn it down.

The ghost of me got up, but it seemed my muscles wouldn’t move. My legs were stitched into the couch and my arms were immobilized as if they were constrained by the very air surrounding them.

She was growing in my mind clearer and clearer as what I perceived to be time ticked on. She was always so impersonal– that reality– always a compromise. She confronts the idea of consciousness, or rather, its purpose. She tells me a table is a table and a book is a book, but I argue that there should be no need for a sense of consciousness to decipher an object’s meaning if she were always true. Yet we still have our conscience, constantly trying to stab holes through her– that reality.

The music was off, but I didn’t remember turning it off. In fact, I don’t remember turning it on.

I closed my eyes, feeling the curves of my shoulders and hips fall deeper into the bed, and I heard the sound of a siren rolling through my head. The sound evolved as I tried to interpret its origin. When I opened my eyes the clock read 6:00am and yet only just a second ago I was in my car. Or was I on my couch?

In the shower it was dark, for the light in my bathroom had burnt out months ago and the obscure blackness of the slate comforted me. There was no light, yet there were still shadows, and I put a pale, cold and lifeless leg into the unsympathetic water. The jolt of it made me clench my fists and lock my joints as I stood there in the shower with the thumping on my back, flowing down to the legs that I could not see.

The water always took so long to get hot, and always got cold again so quickly. The clock, with its incessant ticking, would argue with my conscience stating that, in fact, the water was only cold for a few seconds and primarily warm. However, my reality, my compromise with the tangible, never seemed to match the clock.

The steam rose up in puffs of fluid white that captured what little light there was, and hugged my pale body, absorbing into my lungs with a soft consoling inhale. The colors of life were sucked out; leaving only faded tones in the soft white light. Black and white was this room. Black and white was this reality.

I remembered the car, the music, and the alarm.

            I put my head under the faucet and closed my eyes as the water fell like honey over my head, blocking out the detached quietness of the morning. I opened my eyes.

 I remembered anxiety and maybe music. I still remember an alarm.

Grabbing the soap, I squeezed it into my hand in a pool of glossy white.

I remember an alarm. I remember I dreamt of something. I remember…

Just like that, what once was my reality, and then was my conscience, faded into a lost memory. What was only hours ago so concrete is now gone forever in the obscure blackness of the slate. It must have been sucked out when the color was taken away. Or maybe it evaporated through the pours of my face when the steam rolled up the shower glass. Perhaps it never really existed at all?

She slapped me in the face with cold water again. That reality was always so skilled at building walls in my brain to only be broken down each night in my dreams. She always made me move and never question. I disliked her coldness. I admired her tenaciousness. I distrusted her immensely, but she grounded me with this world.