My uni-friend James is impossibly polite. I thought I was a reasonably welcoming person, but no, by comparison, I’m like that senile fart on his balcony calling, ‘Off me lawn’ to six-year-olds as they dip their toes off cracked pavement edges to avoid breaking their mothers’ backs. On that Dungeons & Dragons alignment system, he sits way past the border of Lawful-Good on a vector that approaches an infinite. He compliments my stories and assists me with assignments. Sometimes I feel guilty in his presence because I’m simply not worthy of such exquisite pleases and thank-yous.
James and I live a ten-minute walk from each other, but socialise once a quarter on average. Our last meetup occurred mid-January (about the same time I left my engineering job). For Sunday dinner, he brought to my house a caramel slice in a casserole dish and pre-whipped cream in a glass mixing bowl. A dessert that was not required or requested; he’s just like that, polite. We drank homebrew, ate dinner, played a board game, and ate dessert, and all throughout James was James: he did not chastise me like other friends do, not even once! And then upon departure, he used curtesy and tact to convince me that the leftover slice and leftover cream was better off left in their original containers, Glad Wrapped, and stored in my fridge. This despite my savoury and his sweet tooth. This despite the dish and bowl belonging exclusively to him. ‘We live a ten-minute walk from each other,’ he said. ‘I’ll come by and pick them up.’
At 5 p.m. for five days following, I snacked on slice until sick. Then, soothed myself in a postprandial bath to relieve from stress, both work-related and abdominally provoked. When the casserole dish was empty and the mixing bowl licked clean, I washed James’ dishes, dried them, and vowed to return them soon.
Months went by.
I kept his kitchenware in the boot of my car. Four times I shopped at the IGA directly below his house and neglected to return the trays. The fifth time I hurried through, peeped my head around aisle corners to check that he wasn’t there. In these months, I drove past his house, beneath his balcony, upwards of twenty times, and stooped my head, fixed my eyes on the road, and resisted the magnetic urge to look up. I feared catching his eye through the window of the car, and seeing his face twist to disappointment from its usual bonhomie.
More months went by.
I removed the dish and bowl from the boot and set them neatly on the bench beside my apartment’s exit, a constant reminder of what good friends do, what polite friends do, what James would do for me. Here they collected dust. Here these objects reflected back to me my own guilt. I would reach toward them, and then reach past them, and then grab my keys and go. It didn’t help that his house was directly on my route to the library, which I rode to on weekdays. Each time I got to his block’s roundabout, I’d up my gears and peddle through faster, fleeing from the shame.
Cultivating guilt is like growing muscle. You create these micro-tears in the membrane of your social life, and your body reacts by filling those holes with more guilt, more muscle, until you’re this bulky cuboid of a person turning sideways to get through doors and social settings, awkward and unfit despite your brawn. Too much muscle is a burden. When you’re jacked like me, it is necessary to shed some mass. So, you can: (1) Sever a limb. But I did not want to erase James from my life. Or, you could: (2) Exercise sensibly. But I was resistant to the option of returning the trays because the guilt was so built it was imposing. Finally, there is: (3) Stop working out altogether, let the muscle degrade, wither until there is nothing left, until you’re a strip of streaky bacon. This option boils down to ‘relax and forget.’ The best way to do this is to bathe.
I measure my average mood by the frequency of my baths; they’re primarily poured for stress relief. For example, in January, towards the end of my job, I was soothing my muscles thrice weekly. Since then, I’ve had only one: The James-Induced Ablution.
The guilt got to me at lunchtime when I opened the fridge to find his mixing bowl used as a storage vessel. It contained 600 mL of ranch. It’s not our bowl. It’s James’. It’s not our bowl. It’s James’. This usage of the bowl signified the early stages of ownership, and thus the early stages of theft, betrayal, and irredeemable sin. I’d have to change my name and phone number. Change my face. My breathing quickened. My heart rate pushed sweat from my palms. And in that moment of climaxing stress, I needed the heat of bathwater to open my taught muscles. I needed the echo of a bathroom to soften my ears. I needed the pressure of the water to swaddle me, and the lap of it to reassure. I needed a closed-off bathroom to exist as a kind of capsule outside of reality so that I may forget all that I had neglected to do for James, who surely, with all his politeness, would’ve promptly returned my own loaned kitchenware to me. I needed to relax, to weaken the guilt. So, I ran a bath. But bathing is unlike cycling. In my half-year hiatus, I had forgotten its many quirks.
I pour the bath. But the temperature is impossible to get right; the water that comes out of the tap is subject to thermically invert as it streams through the bathroom air and slaps against the cold acrylic of the bath so that what I feel with the back of my hand in the stream is going to be different to the final state of the bath when poured. I contemplate measuring the initial state of all objects involved in the heat exchange and calculating what input is required for the right output, but this process would involve getting out old uni books from the top of the pantry, and going through old papers and calculations, and likely calling James to help me with the problem which is the opposite of what I’m trying to think about. And besides, what is the right temperature? I want the water to be warm for entry, say 35℃, so my ankles don’t ache and so my tush doesn’t sting, but 35℃ is far too cold for optimal bathing. The bath I pour is somewhere in between, both hurting my ankles and uncomfortably cool. So, once I’m in, I twist the hot tap with my dexterous toes and my heel burns in the pure-hot stream.
And then I dry my hands with a bath-side towel and sink down to my shoulders to read, essential for escaping reality. I get through the first sentence before my glasses cloud over, transparent as white pearl from the steam. The whole reason I’m wearing them is to avoid the onset of an eye-strain migraine, but squinting through opaque plastic is just as likely to incite such a head-throbbing thing. And the ‘smart’ light in our bathroom is far too bright to be soothing, and the app on my phone that adjusts the brightness malfunctions, and when I message Jess to dim it for me through her phone, she shifts the colour of the light from toxic green to developing-room red and back. And the playlist I choose is never flawless. There are always songs that have lyrics that distract me from reading or tempos that increase my blood pressure. And I can hear neighbours’ effluent flush through the building, and the heat makes me sweat so I feel sticky and unclean, and Jess changes the light to blinding, and Jess changes the light to off, and I’ve added so much water to balance the temperature of the bath it’s now spilling over the lip onto my towel and onto phone. My dick floats and looks at me. A sneer. I should’ve returned James’ trays. I should’ve returned them months ago.
The water goes tepid. I blow bubbles. The water goes cold.
I pull the plug and as the water drains I imagine the surface of it scanning my body, building a 3D model of every crevasse and fault. Without buoyancy, I feel heavier. My skin is slack. The drainpipe squeals, and I’m left lumped in the basin, a wet sultana. A catfish squirming upon the greyish silt of a drained dam is more sightly than what you see here. I cough and slide from the tub and moisten myself with my wet towel. My muscles are tense and shivering. Wet-haired and goosebumped, I message James, and then the next day, return his trays. He rewards me with several exquisite thank-yous.
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