The overall rules of the writes are that all things are considered fiction.
The following piece briefly describes urinating and has sexual references. So skip it if you don't want to hear such things from your daughter/sister/friend/niece. . .
There is a nasty looking spider in my bathroom. I don't want to be derogatory. I just mean it's big enough that I can clearly see all its legs and the bends in all its knee joints.
I know spiders don't have knees, but you know what I mean.
If it falls from the ceiling while I'm peeing, it will not land on me, and I'll have ample time to stop mid-stream, pull up my underwear and exit before it has time to scamper over to me.
This give me some peace at least.
I've come to not like bathrooms. They all have mirrors in them. I have enough mirrors - mirrors on the inside, mirrors on my fingers, mirrors in the gaze of others, mirrors in the non-gaze of others. I suppose the spider gives me a vacation from myself. I mean, I'm on vacation, but some things we take with us.
It is always this way- the mind is so crowded all the time. It's as if it's filled with furniture, and as I'm walking to the kitchen to get a glass of water, I'll inevitably smack my shin on the sharp angled edge of some fresh anxiety that juts out and spoils the trip.
For instance, I could be in the middle of a perfectly decent sexual fantasy but right when we're about to take our clothes off, we accidentally push ourselves through one of those sexy hotel windows and plummet to our deaths, completely spoiling the mood.
And for a quick aside, I'd like to mention I hear a faint tapping coming vaguely from the direction of the bathroom ceiling. In my mind, it's the spider, tapping its foot, while devising an evil plot against me.
I know spiders don't have feet, but still. . .
I think it's safe to say all the mind-furniture is getting in the way of life journeys, both mental and actual. It's hard to really enjoy a rainbow when one is fixated on the presentation at work next week. It's really hard to enjoy a presentation at work, as if such a thing is even possible, when one has already imagined being labeled incompetent for the last three weeks.
This all to say I don't like bathrooms with all the mirrors.
And I wish the spider didn't bother me so much. Which is to say, I wish that things you'd think were much smaller than me were not so scary.
I'd like to live in a world without spiders and without presentations at work and without big sexy hotel windows. Maybe there's part of me that would like to steer clear of lovers and rainbows as well. I've learned I could only avoid smacking my shin on the furniture in my mind, if I didn't first have a home to live in.
This metaphor might be going off the rails at this point.
I will say this - tonight I'll be back in that bathroom. The first thing I'll do is check to see if the spider has moved. I'll brush my teeth without looking in the mirror, I'll pee, all the while, with eyes towards the ceiling. Then I'll go to bed, after having taken down my hair and taken off my clothes in the dark. You can extract whatever meaning from that that you'd like.
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