#30: In Absence
By Lourdes Sharp
Amaya found the setting sun submerged with her in a taffy pink bathtub; the clouds in the water forming no shape of earthly objects. She searched for joy in a day that had yet to begin, a day that had no direction and no externally set purpose. Amaya willed her mind to be at ease. It was a daunting task, for her mind was rarely given the time to be at ease. She did not know when days like this would end, if she would find someone else’s agenda to adopt, or any purpose outside of herself, and so often these thoughts would fill with the minutiae of others in any moment of silence.
She lifted a leg inspecting the air around it for rivulets of steam, finding tranquility in rivers that flowed towards the sky. For just a moment, she seemed to think of herself as a bucket of crab legs waiting to be doused in lemon juice squeezed straight from the fruit. She imagined an evening spent in New Orleans, dressed in a flirt of a dress, sitting across from a special someone. The only thing separating them in those moments would be a bucket of her own legs.
“Have you ever been covered in warm milk?” she inquired after her toes. Her heels were propped up on the faucet, and her toes twiddled bashfully at this rare attention. Finally, her mind startled to settle in her imaginings. The white liquid, glorious in all it’s unpasteurized fattiness, seeping through every crevice of her skin and softening the lines across her body. The streams of milk turned to white plumes among the pink skies sequestered to the confines of the tub.
Lost in thought, Amaya didn’t hear the footsteps leading up to the abrasive sound of the doorknob turning. Sitting straight up, the water resettled in a short cacophony that sounded something like shattering glass and moved the water in a way that made her stiff body slightly sway with it. For a moment and a half’s hesitation, she couldn’t settle on “someone’s in here,” “I’m in here,” or wait for her roommate to walk away without the need for an exchange of words.
“I’ll come back later.” She heard the door shut before it had even opened completely.
Relieved, Amaya felt her body soften into the waters, but when she settled into the bath again, she could not see the milk, nor let her senses succumb to the steam. The moment, interrupted, could not be recovered. Because her lamentations were dismissed, she aimed for a new one.
Her eyes closed again, and she let her mind drift back to nothingness. Among the liminal space of darkness behind her eyelids, a blue circle emerged, and continued to expand. As the color became duller, the circle got bigger. A red haze invaded her vision before the blue circle died. The kaleidoscope of colors turned into squares that beget triangles and before she knew it: There was a little girl in a yellow raincoat jumping haphazardly into puddles on the street, giggling with every exhale. Her curly ringlets bounced around, less voluminous from the weight of the rain, but still followed her head with unquestioned loyalty. This girl was a stranger to Amaya, but nevertheless, Amaya’s achilles unconsciously twitched with every jump the girl made: each motion absorbed by the water of the tub. She sank further into the waters, until it reached her chin, then finally let the water line rest at the bottom of her lip. She silenced the smallest of voices that pleaded with her to not let the hair on the nape of her neck get wet. The tranquility she felt was worth unruly hair.
Following the voice of her mother to come inside, the little girl raced up the porch steps and wrapped her arms around her mother’s legs. The girl looked up at her mother, leaving a wet spot on her mother’s jeans. Her mother’s late reflexes to keep herself dry softened into a small caress atop her daughter’s curly hair.
The sun was starting to set, filling the puddles with melted sorbet as the sun slowly plummeted towards the horizon. “What am I gonna do with you?” she asked as the little girl—
“Hey! Sorry. Can I come in for just a sec? I think I left my headphones in there.” And in an instant, the vision was gone. Amaya was shocked back into her pink bathtub.
“Oh yeah, sure, come in.” “What?”
“Yes, come in!”
For some reason it seemed to take more energy than it should have to push the words through the width of the bathroom door. Amaya adjusted the shower curtains so that her face wouldn’t be visible through the crack, not because she didn’t want her roommate, Samantha, to see her undressed, but because it was a makeshift wall of plastic and floral print that fortified a flimsy boundary to her space.
While Samantha rummaged around, Amaya couldn’t help but stare at the shiny metal faucet and pick at her fingernails that were submerged in the water.
“Well, I guess I didn’t leave them here,” Samantha sighed. “Oh – we’re also running low on toilet paper, are you going to the store anytime soon?” “Um, yeah I was going to go tomorrow when I get out of work, I can get some then.”
“Okay, no worries! I was going to go Sunday so I could also get some then if you don’t get any tomorrow,” she continued. “Oh and I’m going to Sagel’s, I’ll probably be back tomorrow morning
“Alright, tell him I said hi!” “I will. See ya.”
Amaya had forgotten all about the curly-headed girl, and instead chanted don’t forget to buy toilet paper in her head. After a few times, her mantra changed, and she remembered everything that was on her mental ‘To Do’ list: the deadlines that were coming up, the dishes she didn’t have time to wash yesterday, the forlorn looking clothes lying on her bedroom floor, Perry the monarch caterpillar her third grade teacher stepped on when Amaya forgot to secure the lid on the container, the permission slip in 6th grade she forgot to get her mom to sign so she had to stay in another teacher’s class while all the other kids went on the field trip to the planetarium. She forgot why she decided to take a bath in the first place, and let her mind wander farther and farther away from her little bathroom. The mundaneness of practical thought caused a cacophony of repressed thoughts until—
She shivered. How long has she been in this tub? The water had surpassed lukewarm as she noticed the goosebumps on her skin above the waters. She drained the water a half inch lower and turned the hot faucet on to replace the lost warmth. She remembered the gift her mother had given her months ago and stood abruptly, bending awkwardly at the hip to peer into the cabinet for epsom salts. In front of its container was a bottle of ibuprofen that stared at her. She shook her head to erase the intrusive thought of downing the whole bottle of pills and returned to the pink sunset she had unintentionally captured in her bathtub and threw in a dash of the salty rocks. She leaned back, closed her eyes and breathed in the scent of lavender and eucalyptus.
Maybe it was an undiagnosed genetic predisposition, but in the absence of a continual stimulus Amaya’s thoughts were not tethered to her immediate memory. Strange as it was, the depth of emotion connected to one thought was forgotten in haste of the next one. Amaya slipped back into a state of comfort as she reconnected with the neutrality of the present. She muted the interruptions of her roommate and the subsequent flurry of planning and expectations. She raced her fingers over her thighs and swatted at the space above them so she could feel the tickle of moving water. She hummed, and her soft voice reverberated off the pink tiles creating a soft echo chamber. Maybe I am lonely.
If it was loneliness she felt, it was a dull loneliness, a quaint lonesomeness. Or maybe it was just solitude that overstayed its welcome. She yearned for no one. There was no particular face, nor scent, nor smile that she missed, and yet, she could not help but feel the space that grew in her head, creating a soft echo of words. The hum of these thoughts vibrated against her head and made her toes feel numb.
Although she liked her roommates, they lived in the practical world. They spoke of fleeting crushes, and the things that happened throughout their day. Their words would spill over each other with such a frenzy, like a sputtering stream that would quickly fill the room up to their necks. The waterline would be so high that there was no more space left in Amaya’s head for her thoughts to reach her lips. She was not one who could easily interject. For her, it was unnatural to dam a river.
The water started to get cold again. She decided not to refill the tub with warmer water and pulled the lever, which slowly started to drain the water. With soap and a washcloth, she quickly scrubbed her body and rinsed herself off with the shower head. She wrapped herself in a towel, sat at the edge of the tub, and watched quietly as the waterline traveled from her ankles to the bottoms of her feet. In some partially subconscious way, she commemorated the vision of the little girl playing in puddles to her feet in the tub. She softly remembered the kaleidoscope of colors, and amidst all the remembering, she promptly forgot all about the toilet paper.
The best parts of Amaya lived in thought, but it remained there, never pushing for physical manifestations. She knew that others’ autonomy could not compare to her imagination in the end. In fact, that would be the only time Amaya could ever fall in love – if the person of her affection was better in person than in thought. She watched as the murky vortex emptied the last of a fuschia sky down the drain. Maybe tomorrow will be a day for something.
*As featured in Issue No. 1 of Deixis Journal