the bathroom

visions of half-sleep / night routine

Evenings come and go. Nights gaze at her angular face through the bathroom mirror: she is contained by a fatigue that gains shape and gnaws on her flesh (so heavy is its burden, like a cylinder enclosing her width). Her bangs flank her face similarly to these ( ) parentheses in between gullies of face wash. Her mouth encircles a glass straw, she absorbs neutral tone colored beverages, she drinks full cow’s milk, gulps it like a good night’s dream when it starts withering in a summer morning —————— She allows for 10 minutes in total to get ready for bed, as if it’s some quest of nobility. she long ceased to read on why she acts and melds in the way she does, her speed, its mindlessness, etc..

She braids her hair at night, always contemplating between 2 or a singular braid. What will give her less the impression she s been losing hair density, this year’s spiral? Her eyes are adrift; they do not claim to see what streams, and in what direction: mold is static, but the voices of neighbors erode the walls into a fleet vacuum. As per her own mouth, words often do not make sense, or at least they’re redundant in their routine, they are an imaginary storm: everything is left pristine once they are gone. Eyes and mouth remain therefore so shut.

Everytime her hand passes through her hair, a new word comes alive. Is this really happening? Why seek new instances or idioms, why ever speak when you can stare at your own self until you’re ghastly and clear. Yes, the brevity of a still, clueless body, of hair when it gets sticky in wet palms. I am a perfectionist in ways, she murmurs to the night. In mantric motion, she restates: i am the mold that grows and refuses to falter, i am this wednesday night.

Words are evasive in this space. Her rote bathroom visits start in exhilaration and wind up in unknowing.

She scavenges for something to think. Thoughts, like talking to God at night, are what occupy her mind in the absence of a likelier abyss to pour out into. The Croatian river that suffuses her arteries and neurons is the first thought that arises when she tries to conjure some beauty and some light; the first and only time she touched it and was guided away. it has the same cadence as her mind, or the frantic close friends stories she posts as attempts to weave the banal into an unassuming sublime. they flow and glimmer and are forgotten in ease and unguilt. Then, there’s the sink pipe that pours straight into the shower aperture. One plumber shook his head in great dismay at its sight, but she grew an ear for it; the way water goes and comes and is stopped sporadically by growing masses of residue, exactly like the Cetina river. The way it all eventually dissipates. The light bulb, unchanged for 4 years, finally made its mark by going off, gracefully dim. Her mind is the bathroom with the door bolted. Her face (peeled, moisturised, damp) is a creek. She will post about it, she will wash it with much much soap, she will forget.