Porcelain

There are a lot of ghosts in this bathroom. Not so much the real ones, least that I know of. No, it's just memories and echoes of sound, buried in the pipes, leaking from the faucets. Dreams like videos we watch in the mirror. Crushed under thousands of feet on this tiled floor. Checkered. Like we're all just pawns.

I'm alone. That's when it scares me the most. A large, cold, windowless room. No sign of life. No sign of where I came from. No sign of where I'm going. This bathroom could be anywhere. I could walk out and realize I don't know who I am anymore. All because this great void has me by myself. It's a shadowless predator waiting to create horror films.

I stare at the mirror, face to face with myself. Whoever that is. It's funny, I'm so scared of walking out into the light of life and discovering something's changed and yet here I am searching in a piece of glass for some constant, some answer. I don't have anything to change. I trace the lines of my cheek bone, the shadows around my eyes, the corners of my lips. I can look and look but no matter what I do the picture doesn't make sense. It's strange and yet so familiar.

I don't like my eyes staring at me. Laughing at how impossible it is for me to get out of here and never look back. They want me to stay and examine for hours. To always second guess. It drives me crazy. I punch the glass. It gives more easily than I had expected. My face is covered in a spider web. There are red rivers slipping over my knuckles. I look down at my sliced hand, then back at the mirror. I let out a breath.

I turn on the faucet and let it wash everything away. I hear those echoes now, all those voices that came and went. The laughter, the moaning, the screaming. Blood wiped off the floor. Vomit wiped off the mouth. Scraps of toilet paper floating onto the tiles. Shoes smudging it all together.

The tears well up right about then. It's funny because we're not supposed to feel sad when we are. We're supposed to feel sad when we've got a reason. But I don't. Honestly, I don't. Not one the rest of the world could pin down and label as a reason to feel so crummy. I just can't shut out all those people. Floating through. Balloons in the wind, one by one becoming airless. Ghosts.