Hayley Garrison Phillips

Friday, January 14, 2011

On paper I do not have much of a routine, it’s true. I have classes, but besides those I wake, eat, exercise, sleep, do homework, and socialize completely randomly. This seems significant, these all being the major tenements of every healthy human being’s life. However, despite my lack of a bigger routine, I have noticed that the precision and efficiency of my smaller daily tasks seem superhumanly heightened.

For example. I keep a kitchen sponge in my shower. This way, every time I take a shower, I use the green brilly side to clean one tile and gently scrub out any mold in the caulking. This way, I never have to spend a four hour stretch working away uncomfortably at a vast expanse of moldy tile.

I also like to sit down in my shower while I shave my legs. I aim the showerhead towards the wall so that the spray just hits my back and then I sit like a little kid and shave away.

When I am really, really depressed and I have to shower, it is like things are in slow motion. I see the shower knobs, hot and cold. I watch strange dry hands emerge glistening from under the slow, loud stream. I wait, shivering with a muted anticipation, until I can see the clouds of steam traveling up towards the ceiling lamp. Then I step in. I wet myself all over and then drop so that I am sitting, and curl to one side and let myself fall so that I am, literally, huddled fetus-shaped on the shower floor beneath the water stream. I wait until my eyelashes are soaked and there is a sting in my eyes.

I listen with an ear against the water against the floor. I can hear the house around me and I hear the water coming down so loud and total. There exists nothing but this rush of the water, the sensuality of the heat and its pure comfort, the relaxation of lying down, coddling myself, and then, of course, the exposure of nakedness.

The ritual is mythical, I am sure of it. It’s the practice of a wise shaman. I’m not sure if it fosters or exorcizes those cold skeletal beings mutilating within me, sometimes I feel as though I’m defeating them, other times as though I’m becoming them.

And afterwards I make a cup of tea. I get into my bed, into the jersey sheets and under the down comforter. I crack my window so I can hear the people passing on the street. Somehow I am erased and reborn. Something gritty like salt inside me has been dissolved and ground away and dispersed.

I wrote a poem about this ritual once and I showed it to Natasha. She said she knew, exactly, exactly the feeling.

And that’s usually how I end up making friends.