Shower Curtains

When we first moved into the flat less than a year ago, I changed the shower curtains. They cost about £3 from the nearest Argos, located a 5 minute walk away along Grey's Inn Road. Today as I took a shower, I decided to sit down in the bathtub and splash warm water onto myself. As I sat there, hunched over and switching hands to hold the shower head, I mused on how dirty the bottom half of the shower curtain had gotten. From a rather boring shade of beige, it had somehow transformed into a rather brownish-yellowy patch. It also had a strange smell to it. I wondered what substances exactly clung to its synthetic fibres; skin cells, follicles, residual soap and shampoo, urine perhaps? Perhaps other even more sinister substances that I couldn't begin to even imagine, or wouldn't want to think resided within the weave of my shower curtain. Bacteria. Fungus. Viruses.

I close my eyes and feel the warm water running down my back. I think of Saturday, when I'll meet my grandparents at the airport for our holiday. I think of my exams, over just yesterday. I think of the irreverent ME NO UNDERSTAND QUESTION, complete with a dinosaur going RAWR that I drew for question 2 of my exam paper, because I didn't know how to answer it. I think of Rajan, and the whirlwind of the past few days. I think of the future, and feel the strange mixed feelings of my heart straining and the heady exhilaration of the unknown.

I consider putting him and our few days up on a grand, marbled pedestal. Pretend and tell myself that he's the love of my life, that I love him. Tell myself that, convince myself that, so I'll not be an emotional slave to another man. So I won't fall and be hurt again, in love instead with an impossible idea that only works because he's not around. Fall in love with an illusion, a memory, 7 days. Fall in love with what could have been. I think maybe I'll fly to America over Winter break, see him again, plan to do my masters in the USA. Start planning my life around him, think of our children running around our yard. Our exotic mixed-raced children. We'd have three of them.

Or maybe after Saturday when we both leave London I'll will myself to forget him. Erase from my memory the way his eyes crinkle up at the sides when he smiles, erase the smirk he always gives me, erase the way he smells. I'll never talk to him, never see him again for the rest of my life. Never send him the postcards I promised. Years later, when his name pops up in the papers I'll pretend not to know him. "But you went to the same university for a year," people will insist, "and you were in the same department!", but still I'll pretend to not know him even though I'll probably remember his laugh, the feel of his skin, thinking of him everytime I hear the word tautology.

He was my carpe diem, my trigger to remember why I'm living rather than just merely alive, a burst of life. And tonight, I see him for what could very well be the last time in my life. I will miss him, but it's the thought that he might miss me that makes things feel unbearable. That everything is so senseless. I think, rather pretentiously, of a Nietzsche quote, "what really raises one's indignation against suffering is not suffering intrinsically, but the senselessness of suffering".

I will see him at 6pm, and tomorrow I'll leave for a 12 week Baltic cruise with my grandparents.