Daydream in the bathtub

As she was holding my head close to her chest, I could hear her heart beating, her breath coming down to her lungs through her trachea and steaming back up as she was sobbing silently. I also heard her crying gently as she arrived, felt the warm tear droplets on my messy black hair and now and then she skipped a breath to ask me with her broken voice if I was ok. No words came out of my mouth, no tears streamed down my face, I was petrified, I felt lonely, I felt sadness, anger and frustration as she kept asking if I was ok. I couldn’t answer, not because I was not ok, I think I couldn’t answer because I thought of my childhood, I remembered feeling lonely, sad, angry and frustrated when the other kids asked me where my mom was.

No words came out of my mouth back then, I could only think of my grandma smiling while she was staring at me. While sunlight lit her gold curly hair and her pale white skin, her eyes looked greener when the sunlight was shining on them and you could know that everything was ok back then, I thought; and I still think, that was how a mother looked like, just younger I guessed every time, and then; I knew I could point with my finger at her and tell the others “there is my mom”.

She asked me one more time if I was ok while she held me even closer to her chest, more than hearing her heart, now I could feel it beating too, pounding her chest from the inside as if it wanted to come out and hold me too. It started beating faster as she kept asking me desperately if I was ok, still couldn’t answer, I only felt lonelier, sadder, angrier and the frustration turned into more loneliness, more sadness and more anger.

Some tears started flowing down my cheeks, I could taste some of the salty tears on the tip of my tongue and could hear some other fall into the water of the bathtub. It made me remember some rainy days when I was a toddler, making a big tantrum over a stupid tv show that I was going to miss because we were sitting in the traffic, hours passed, and the tantrum turned into sleepiness. When I woke up it was Saturday morning and my dad was sitting next to my bed singing a good morning song while the sun shone through the window and a fresh smell of eggs and ham clouded the house.

I started feeling confused and sleepy, closed my eyes for a moment and the smell of lavender and iron became stronger, in the distance I could hear some phones ringing, dogs barking and people talking. All the noise was so distant, it couldn’t even bother me, I felt in peace for a moment when she started shaking me. “Don’t fall asleep lazy boy, talk to me” she said looking into my eyes and knowing that no words came out of my mouth. I couldn’t feel her heart beating, couldn’t hear it either. But I could feel her warm hands grabbing me from the shoulder, shaking me gently while I was smelling some of the lavender and iron that was steaming from the hot bathtub.

Suddenly the loneliness and the sadness were all I could remember; the smell of lavender and iron turned the anger into a peaceful daydream. This daydream felt so real. As she was sitting in her sofa watching some strange Mexican soap opera, I was sitting in the ground getting my back scratched while I was playing some stupid videogame. Nowadays I still enjoy getting my back scratched as much as I enjoy a good meal or a splendid drink. But I’ll guess it was just a daydream.

The water turns colder and colder and the bathtub feels uncomfortable, there are so many people in the room that I can tell that I don’t feel lonely anymore, just sad. And every time I feel sad, I just close my eyes, hope to fall asleep and try to wake up a little less sad. But as I bleed out, I feel the sadness flow out of my body as I get sleepier. Everything looks, and sounds, and feels, and tastes so distant, so unreal. As the metallic smell grows stronger and stronger, I suddenly accept my fate and peacefully embrace the cold, the darkness and the silence.