For as long as I can remember, my bathtub has been my sanctuary.
I lived in a house growing up, and I would fill my big, yellow bathtub with hot, hot water and lean over the edge reading a book with now damp pages until I turned into a prune. It was the one place that I was left alone for significant periods of time. If I took too long, my mother would knock, or even tell me to finish up, but it was my bathroom alone, so usually I could retreat for quite a while.
I cry in my bathtub.
I take a bath to get warm when I am cold.
When I have a cold, I will sit in the bathtub with the shower on just breathing in the steam.
Backaches, heartaches, sunburn, anger - the water in my bathtub has always been there for me. Sanctuary.
For a little over one year, I lived in a garage apartment with an itty bitty shower. Loved the apartment. Needed a bathtub.
Years of cats on the edge of the bath. Kitty kisses and kitty paws batting doubtfully at the water, padding up and down, meowing.
When I was in film school, my tall, dark and beautiful boyfriend would sit on the side of the tub and ladle water over me as I cried or bitched or shivered. After a long, long day, he would always sit with me there, often listening with a worried look on his face. Like a little boy who can't figure out how to help. Who doesn't realize how much he is helping.
Now I live in an apartment in the La La. My bathtub has sliding doors mounted on the edge and always blocking half the bath. Not kitty friendly when there were kitties here.
The metal is impossible to clean. The doors fall off the track.
The tub is thinner than a normal tub. It taunts me that if I were to gain weight, my butt would actually touch the sides.
Sometimes, the water comes out discolored, and I have to let it run until it turns clear again.
And I realized the other day, that this bathtub, the one I took the smaller bedroom in my split master to have, is not a sanctuary.
I hate it.
I hate the doors, I hate the thin, and if even the water is turning on me, where I am to turn for comfort? I want to tear those doors off the hinges just so I can breath, and I desperately want to see the clean edge of a full-sized bathtub.
I Want To Buy A Shower Curtain.
This La La Land is so dry, and I can't even figure out what to do with that ocean to the west. That cold, dark ocean and such strange beaches. I miss the Atlantic. I miss tropical rain. I miss home.
But it wouldn't be so bad if I didn't hate my bathtub.
