Seventy-eight Minutes
The shower room has a motion sensor light switch.
Outside.
If you stop moving long enough to wash your hair, dry off, get dressed, or simply sit and organize your belongings, eventually the lights go out.
Then you have two choices.
Wave through the curtain like you’re trying to marshal a Boeing 737.
Or hope somebody walks down the hallway and unknowingly turns the lights back on for you.
That happened several times tonight.
The lights, however, weren’t the biggest problem.
First, I cleaned the shower.
Not because anyone asked me to.
Because I wanted to stand in something I had cleaned myself.
Call me a pussy.
I knew where my feet were going to be for the next hour.
I sprayed the shower chair, grab bars, taps, sink, toilet, and every surface I knew I would touch.
Then I waited the recommended ten minutes for the disinfectant to do its job.
The lights went out.
Somebody walked by.
They came back on.
I carried on.
Only then did I turn on the water.
There was almost no hot water.
So there I was.
A freshly disinfected shower.
No goddamn hot water.
I waited.
Eventually it became just warm enough that waiting any longer seemed pointless.
I lathered up.
Rinsed off.
The shower itself wasn’t the difficult part.
Everything around it was.
There wasn’t enough room for much of anything.
Everything balanced beautifully.
For about three seconds.
The deodorant slipped off the back of the toilet tank.
I watched it begin its graceful dive toward the toilet bowl.
“Fuck!”
Pure instinct took over.
Somehow I got a hand on it, deflecting it away before it completed its mission.
One crisis averted.
Thirty seconds later a plastic bag decided to slide across another plastic bag and make a run for the wet floor.
Caught that one too.
Apparently gravity had picked a side.
The lights went out.
Again.
Somebody walked past.
The lights came back on.
Back to work.
Sometimes it felt less like taking a shower and more like playing defence against a series of tiny disasters.
The floor never really dries.
Water spread well beyond the drain, so getting dressed became another exercise in logistics.
Keep the towel off the floor.
Keep the jeans out of the puddles.
Don’t knock something into the water.
The lights went out.
Again.
I briefly considered screaming.
Instead, I waited.
Eventually somebody walked down the hallway.
The lights came back on.
Apparently my bathroom lighting now depended on pedestrian traffic.
Finally, I was dressed.
Everything was packed.
I rolled back to my bed.
Seventy-eight minutes.
Not because I spent seventy-eight minutes taking a shower.
Because every ordinary task had become an evening’s worth of work.
And even then, I still wasn’t finished.
Laundry.
Return the towel.
Visit the locker.
Comb my hair.
Charge the vape.
Change the insulin pod.
Do the dishes.
Somewhere in there, maybe reward myself with a fucking pop.
—-
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