Bathwater: a Memoir

"Bathwater" was originally published in January 2019 in Arcturus, an online literary magazine from the Chicago Review of Books. 

I wrote "Bathwater" with the hope of accurately describing just one moment in the life of a cancer patient. Oftentimes, the media (books, movies, advertisements, whatever) portray cancer in a romantic way. The unlucky character might throw up a few times and be bald, but that's about it.  Some franchises (I'm looking at you The Fault in Our Stars and A Walk to Remember) use sick patients as "real-life horror stories turned into melodramatic vignettes of doctor’s offices and chemotherapy" (Sproviero). In fact, this happens so often that the Vulture thought it would be a good idea to feature an article which ranks 18 of the best "terminal romance movies."

I'm not saying that cancer shouldn't be written about. It definitely should. But it should be done in the right way, by those who truly understand what it is like.

...

I sit on the edge of the tub as my mother shakes the contents of a bag of bath salts into the churning water. A haze of lavender steam immediately fills the room, rolling off the bathwater in little wisps of smoke. The scent reminds me of waxy corpses at funeral parlors, surrounded by overly cheery arrangements of plastic flowers. Of course, no one blames the undertaker for his choice in floral arrangements. They are clearly the more economical option, as artificial roses are undoubtedly cheaper than living ones. Not that it really matters. The dead don’t complain.

I inhale slowly, allowing the mist to explore my nostrils and settle into the crevices of my mind like a dense fog. The perfume wafts between my blurred thoughts and the remnants of memories. The treatment is supposed to save me from my mutinous blood, but now I feel lost in my own mind, my memories falling out of my head like strands of hair. Most of them are nothing but ghosts of themselves now, grayed imitations of what used to be. The few that I have managed to salvage are worn and faded from overuse, like a pair of jeans that have gone through the wash too many times. The doctors call it brain fog. I call it bullshit.

“Let me help you get in,” my mom says, her voice echoing off the bathroom walls.

I grab hold of her outstretched arm with one hand, fastening each of my fingers into her flesh. I can feel the firm muscle beneath her warm skin with a skeletal hand. My other hand secures the white cotton towel which shrouds my body. I feel like a newborn fawn as I attempt to stand on my buckling limbs, raising one leg over the wall of the bath and letting it drop with a satisfying thunk into the water. The second follows. With my feet now situated, I glance up at my mother and tell her to close her eyes.

Her eyes flutter shut at my request, but the rest of her body tenses, prepared to jump to the rescue if I should fall. The cool air nips at my skin as I remove the towel and gently place it on the nearby counter in a neat little heap. I begin my descent into the murky bathwater, lowering one shaking knee at a time until I look like I could be praying. My mother and I had been doing a lot of that recently. Her words are always full of longing and heartbreak, beautiful and lengthy, prose dripping from her lips. She prays for her sanity as well as mine, but the tears no longer come. We have no energy left to cry. My prayers, however, are not eloquent by any means. They are half-formed pleas, sent off to heaven with misshapen wings that are too small to be of much use. Sometimes I wonder if God ever receives them.

I shift my body so that it is now resting semi-comfortably against one of the porcelain walls and relinquish my mother’s wrist. As she draws back, I see the fading white imprint that my fingers have left upon her skin. Her eyes remain closed.

“Are you sitting down?”

“Yes.”

She opens her eyes, raising them to the ceiling.

“Okay. Be careful. Don’t try to get out by yourself. I will be in the other room, yell if you need me.”

“Mmmhm.” I sink into the tub as she exits, leaving the door slightly ajar.

My eyes are drawn to the purple spider veins which had appeared on my knees sometime within the past few weeks. I trace them with a broken fingernail, then turn my hand over, noticing the dusty blue vessels visible beneath my translucent skin. They run just underneath the surface, pulsing with blood and medications, their only defense a thin layer of flesh. How easy it would be to run my jagged fingernails across them and watch my life drain out into the bathwater –

Faint beeps come from the other side of the bathroom door as my mom dials a number on the phone. I lift my eyes for a few moments, then return my attention to my body as it floats in the frothy water.

I begin to count the constellation of scars on my torso. One, two, three, four. One sits above my right breast, close to my heart. Too close. The thick, taut line is visible when my emaciated shoulders shift beneath my oversized t-shirts, though most people are considerate enough to not ask questions about it. The skin there is numb from the countless needles of hospital visits, my nerves having lost the ability to feel pain. Another scar smiles underneath my belly button, reminding me of the weight I have shed, the appetite I have lost. It is an ironic keepsake of yet another encounter with Death, with whom I have become well acquainted. My life is his favorite morbid sitcom. He watches me in the early hours of the morning, the time when heroin addicts feel the shiver of drug withdrawals up their spines, and disheveled nurses rub their sleep-deprived eyes. The only interruptions to Death’s regularly scheduled programming are sunny pharmaceutical ads, filled with picturesque backdrops and the naïve smiles of second-rate actors who believe that all illnesses can be cured with a handful of ibuprofen and a dose of positivity. My other two scars are from half-forgotten surgeries. They prickle disconcertingly as I pass a finger-tip over them.

I look like boiled chicken, feathers plucked, fleshy and naked. I take some time to inspect the goose pimples which are beginning to appear on my skinny limbs, noticing the empty follicles of each individual bump on my legs. I feel like a child again, mind in the clouds, the skin between my legs hairless, my womanhood erased, and puberty reversed. I can see phantom rubber duckies bobbing alongside me and a myriad of bubbles rising to my nose. They threaten to suffocate me, drown me in kaleidoscopic foam. I blink in alarm at the unexpected uprising and suddenly –

I am alone again.

My mother’s voice resonates from the other side of the door. It is lowered so I won’t hear the concern attached to every syllable, every word, every line, as if I can’t already see the anxiety etched into the creases of her face.

I softly shut my eyes. I am tired of it all. Tired of the assortment of colored pills that I choke down morning, noon, and night. Tired of the metallic taste of saline that washes down each toxin that the doctors pump into my body. Tired of suffocating in the bleached white sheets of sterile hospital rooms. Tired of the endless aching of muscle, bone, and soul. Tired of the dark voices who whisper to me at night. Tired of the guilt that comes from wanting it all to just –

End.

I slip my head under the water, feeling it gently kiss my body and caress my skin. The world beyond the bathroom door is silenced as the water presses up against my ears. I long to sink into its obscurity, to fall asleep and allow the water to wash the pain away, even for just a moment. I am mesmerized by the idea of becoming one with the tepid bathwater, to be held forever in its embrace, like an insect preserved in resin.