Wavelength (continued)
It’s Saturday night. Well, basically almost Monday again. Instead of rest, I am experiencing the worst of my PTSD symptoms. Anniversary season, again. I am desperate for summer. Dark comes early, and nights are long and spent alone. I’m cold, and even colder when I sit still. I struggle to resist the compulsion to do — something, anything — other than rest. Meanwhile, I’ve started to withdraw again. What option do I have, really? I get stalked and harassed relentlessly. I meant it when I said I am afraid.
Because night is long, to distract myself, I am drawing a bath and engaging in what might be maladaptive daydreaming. Either way, it is most certainly a practice in cruel optimism.
The tub in this apartment is the most comfortable yet — but the water is never quite hot enough. It’s a fleeting event. In any event, it’s one of the few places I am, at least kind of, at rest. Because of that, it’s one of the few places I tend to think about other people and really feel the extent of my aloneness. If I forget a towel, I’m rather fucked.
Enter distraction: Do you like the bath?
Would you want to get in or watch me?
Growing up, my parents’ too-frequent travel (or general neglect hidden by class) made their clawfoot tub and glorious bathroom a grateful retreat. In my teen years, one of my nicer boyfriends would sneak in and sit behind me, before we snuck off to my room. There was a lot of hot water, but never enough time.
Now: If you do like the bath, where would you sit, I wonder? In front of me or behind? Or would we take turns — not wanting to share body soup, and/or not wanting to get too attached to sitting in the same spot?
My early 20s were characterized by apartment baths too small and/or too disgusting with housemate filth to dream of sharing with a lover. Now; I wonder how many new-build apartments have nice baths with inadequate water heaters. “These are problems of both intimacy and neoliberalism,” I might say, as you take off your shirt. I am admiring your chest still, whatever its form — it doesn’t seem to matter to me at a rate of 1:1,000,000. Both/and to me, but annoying and/or a turn off to people who just want me to look at their chest or hold something constant like sex, and not politics and sex.
In response, you might roll your eyes and fetch a giant pot of boiling water. I’m hot with your resourcefulness. I’ll crouch in the back of the end-times, new-build tub, carefully out of reach, while you pour from a lobster pot — you being equally careful not to scald me in our attempt to enjoy a bath made too-short by a shitty hot water heater instead of the expanse of human desire. Either way, I’m warmed by the thought. I want to feel your skin. I have litanies of contamination fears, but body soup is not one. Get in, already.
What are you afraid of?
