CONVERSATIONS IN THE SHOWER

They say everything is better with company, I say it’s a stretch.
I failed to protect my sanctity, the one place where I feel whole, where my ideas brew best, Where I feel clean, where I feel in control most. The place where I am not scared of water.

Suddenly there was company, unwanted, uninvited, unplanned.
the lion I had sheltered was indeed hungry.
Not for reasons obvious to the mind.
My soul ignited dreams and lies that he then whispered to me in the space where I needed to recharge, to cleanse myself from the overstimulation of unwanted touches and invasiveness without having the courage to say no.

 Even if you were a sheltered lion, you were still a dangerous species to my kind. But imagining you, stranded without the right claws, out of your wild! This place is unforgiving to animals from the global north especially ones wandering around with expired identification.

These conversations in the shower are exactly how you’re kind talk about them, it is almost as if they haven’t experienced a real shower. To them, it’s always sexual, a reenactment of erotic movie scenes. What a shame it’s not a space to connect with oneself, to wash away the old or to dream, it’s merely a performance.
And for a guy so incredibly smart at physics and math, you’re truly terrible at how anatomies can’t just shape up to accommodate fantasies in the shower.
Yours is but a toy train, it can only go so far.

And so I let the steam dissolve me, weighed down by shame and disappointment, for allowing the space I once called a sanctuary to be claimed by one big lie my empathy chose to embrace.