Sometimes I have trouble taking a shower

The Rouge Wave recently sponsored a 500 word essay on overcoming difficulty. I entered. Again I didn't win. The winning essay was all poignant and shit. Mine was a bit less important.

Here's mine. And once again, apologies to Ex-B. When you date a writer, your life becomes fodder for her musings.


How to fix your broken showerhead

When a boy rips your heart out of your chest and shreds it to make his own pulled-heart-muscle barbecue sandwich (figuratively of course, this is not a horror story), there is one rule you have to follow if you want to keep any kind of dignity you still have floating around in your chest cavity - you can’t call him.

You may see the world’s most awesome zombie short on You Tube and you know this would just make him cream his pants a little, but you can’t send it to him. Otherwise he’ll know he can still ring you whenever he wants and use you for sex and you’ll end up laying on the floor next to the toilet too depressed to pull your face out of the puddle of salty tears you have created. All this will happen if you send him the zombie You Tube link or make a phone call.

I know this. Yet when I stood in my shower, staring up at the shower head as it eeked out a single broken stream of water onto the tub floor all I wanted was to call the man to come fix it. A week ago I could have called him and he would have rushed over with his manly man utility knife, hopped in and made me a rushing flood of water so powerful it could wash my skin off. Then of course would have come the argument about why I’m not allowed to make fun of Jean Claude Van Damme movies and he would call me stupid and I would call him an asshole and then we’d end up sitting all night pouting in our respective corners, which is kind of why he’s not interested in loving me anymore anyway. But at least he would have fixed the showerhead.

But not this week. I can’t call him this week. If I call him he’ll be nice to me and I’ll take that kindness as a sure sign that he wants me back and then I’ll sit around and wait for him to change his mind until it finally dawns on me that he’s never coming back and I’ll find myself on the bathroom floor too depressed to pull my face out of the puddle of salty tears I have created.

So I unscrewed the showerhead. A storm of brownish water burbled its way out of the pipe, splashing all over my face. I looked up into the source. There was one of those little filter thingees, a little screen that sits under the showerhead and accomplishes some mysterious vital purpose. It was turned sideways.

So I turned it back and adjusted the rubber ring underneath it and screwed the shower head back on.

And the water flowed. It flowed gracefully, like a gazelle on an empty African plain. And I leapt under the stream in all its powerful glory and cheered and clapped and realized that I never needed to call him again.