I'm tired of wasting water

I wake up from another night of not being sure if I truly slept, or if the sleep I was able to get was good or not. I can’t tell the difference anymore. I’ve given up on being picky about the sleep I get. As long as, at some point, I’m not conscious to have to deal with real life, I’m good.

 Every morning I wake up shocked that I’m still here. I’m guessing whoever is in charge is waiting on me to gain more experience before calling me home, or maybe they feel I’m meant to suffer a little longer. Regardless of the reason, I’m still shocked whenever my eyes open and I’m still alive.

When I first wake up, I battle with whether or not I want to start my day off with humor, by playing a game of “let’s pretend I’m talking to the woman that I don’t have the luxury of waking up next to because I have too many fucking trust issues,” or do I start off by forcing myself to practice a ritual I may have seen on Instagram about how you can have a positive day if you do a few exercises before you get out of bed. I end up doing none of those things. Instead, I try hard not to think about all of the poor decisions I’ve made that have resulted in me waking up sore from stress and a lack of sleep. I fight hard not to look at my phone first thing in the morning. For once, I would like to start my day off without exposing myself to avoidable annoyances. But it’s hard for me to not want to look at my phone when I first wake up. A part of me checks social media just to see if it’s my turn for everyone in the world to hate me out of existence.

 I sit on the side of my bed, and I look at my Alexa Show device to see if this bitch is watching how I greet the day with so much dread on my face. I don’t know if I want this much technology around me as I get older. I would like to at least preserve my privacy so I can have a place where I can be flawed, with room to learn and grow without being on display. I know there are conspiracy theories about Alexa listening to us. There’s a part of me that wants to get rid of these devices because I partially do believe the stories. Then there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to get rid of them because I don’t want to feed into the plethora of Instagram memes sharing these sorts of rumors.

My mind is a shit show. I struggle with whether or not I should purchase the stickers you can place over the cameras on all of my electronic devices. I actually tell myself that pushing the mute button on my Amazon devices stops the device from recording everything I say. Then I ask myself what’s the point of having all of these devices if I’m going to cover up the camera and keep them from listening to me by pressing the mute button on everything. “How am I supposed to tell this electronic device to do something I’m fully capable of doing if it can’t hear me?” I say to myself out loud.

I ask Alexa to tell me what the weather is going to be for the day so I can decide if I want to go out into the world and wrestle with the climate. It’s been hot, we have wildfires, and they want you to stay inside where the heat is hiding out as well.

This pandemic has given me time to think about everything. A lot of that thinking has been allocated to figuring out how I’m going to earn a living in this new apocalyptic wasteland of uncertainty. 

I go to the bathroom so I can pee. That’s one morning ritual I don’t have a problem fulfilling every day. I take a long hard look at myself in the mirror to see if I’m aging faster or slower. 

I brush my teeth, even though the odds of me talking to another human being who would have the chance to let me know that I hadn’t brushed my teeth is highly unlikely. Before I use my toothbrush, I let the water run a little bit to get hot, so that

I can stick my toothbrush under the faucet and clean it off before I brush my teeth. It’s a habit. I believe if you want to make sure that germs aren’t on something that you plan to stick in your mouth, you should run hot water over it.

As I wait on the water to get hot enough to clean my toothbrush, I think about how first world I’m behaving by letting water, which I don’t want to use because it’s not hot enough, run down the drain. Then I think about all the countries where there are people who wouldn’t care what the temperature of the water was; they would simply be happy to have any water at all.

I take a shower for the same reason that I brush my teeth, so I can maintain and hold on to some of the normalcy of what life was like before COVID. Now, I will take a shower, but I will debate on whether or not I will put deodorant on after. I don’t feel I need to put on deodorant every time I shower. Unless I’m going to be around other people, I don’t see the purpose. I can handle how I smell if I start to come off a little uneasy to the nose. 

Once again, I find myself allowing water to go unused as I wait for it to heat upmbefore I get in the shower. I become ashamed of myself as I realize how unknowingly ungrateful I am on a daily basis. Because I don’t like to step into a cold shower, I allow gallons of water to run down the drain until it reaches a temperature of my liking. 

My neurosis immediately kicks into high gear, and I try to imagine how much water we must waste that could go to nourish and hydrate a city or a small country. Then I think, “What if I created a non-profit organization that went around collecting wasted water wherever we can find it and give it to people who needed it?” I would name it Wasted Water Wranglers of the World. The objective would be to bring awareness to those who may not realize they are wasting water and let them know what the water they’re wasting could do for someone who doesn’t have access to any. I would collect the wasted water that people all over the world take for granted and give it to people who would give anything for some clean water. I would propose we go around and install wasted water filter traps in everybody’s home. At the end of the month, my organization would collect all the water in the traps and ship it to people who need it. I wouldn’t limit my organization to collecting water from just homes. I would work with restaurants to see if they’d be willing to let wranglers bus tables and, in exchange, keep any water left behind by patrons. I don’t know how profitable this organization that I’m proposing would be, but it doesn’t stop me from wanting it to exist. I’ve had time to sit and think about practically everything in the world during this quarantine. I don’t think putting a price on the value of a life, or something that can keep a person alive, is a world we should want to live in anymore. This downtime should be dedicated to thinking of ways to improve life so life doesn’t have to be hard for anyone.

I have no dreams of becoming the next Jeff Bezos with this water wrangling idea. Even though I’ll probably make him even richer because I’ll end up buying stuff I need for my company through him. I simply would like to make enough money so I can move anywhere in the world where I could live peacefully. I would love to own a piece of land large enough to have a garden that would be able to feed anyone I invited to come live with me. I would love nothing more than to be able to create a place where reading, eating healthy, listening to music, gardening, and relaxing would be the only requirements. I would also like it if calories did not exist on this hypothetical world I’m creating. 

I think about all of this while I’m taking my shower. I fantasize in my head what a playful argument would be like if I was showering with a woman who was hogging the water. This isn’t an argument that I’ve never had before, but it hasn’t happened in a long time and, at the rate things are going, it may never happen again. Then I ask myself what’s the purpose of me cleaning my body, unless there was a soap that could wash my complexion off so I can enjoy life in peace. Me washing my body isn’t going to increase my chances of receiving fair treatment in this world. A part of me showers because I know there are people in this world that expect me to have an odor based off my complexion. I really want to cry, because I know there is no place in this world where I can go and people won’t judge me without taking my complexion into consideration. I’m not safe anywhere on this goddamn planet. I can’t count on anyone to protect me, to keep me safe. I’m on my own. I wake up every day knowing that there are people in the world who won’t be happy until anyone who looks like me is completely removed from this planet.

I allow my mind to drift to a story I saw on social media about another Black man who was shot by the police. This time, he was shot in the back seven times. Videos of Black men being gunned down by the police are just as common and as popular as TikTok videos mimicking the President’s speeches. You can’t miss them.

 Then I have trouble determining whether or not the water that’s dripping from my face is from the shower or from my eyes. I’m not sure I can cry due to the fact that I’m numb from dealing with the same shit for the past forty-four years. There’s no possible way for me to cry but I allow the water on my place to play the role of tears I don’t have the ability to give. 

I don’t ever feel clean and, because I don’t ever feel clean, I feel like I’m wasting water even more. I feel dirty because people hate my complexion to the point where I question whether or not I’m cursed. I feel dirty because, even though I wasn’t aware of the trauma my childhood experiences caused me, I still feel like every thought I have about myself not deserving anything nice is warranted. I feel like I’m wasting water because I don’t see a resolution in sight anytime soon, and I don’t know what is the point of being clean for a dirty world anymore.

Time moves slowly when you’re in your head, taking a stroll through your depression. Before I know it, I’ve been in the shower for more than thirty minutes. I’m so mad at myself for taking a shower that was the same length as one someone who worked a double at a hospital would probably take. I get out of the shower to avoid feeling dirtier than I did before I got in.

 One of my favorite movies growing up was Final Destination. It’s a movie about a kid who avoids Death by getting him and some of his friends kicked off a plane before it crashes. The rest of the movie death is out to get the kid and his friends. There’s a scene in the movie where a kid dies in the bathroom because he slips and falls. 

 Slipping and falling in the shower is one of my greatest fears in the world. Dying naked is actually the real reason why I don’t want to slip and fall in the bathroom. Finding me on the floor dead with clothes on, is something I can live with. I don’t want to die naked. I also don’t want to die on the toilet.  The stories I tell myself people would come up with to explain how I died is too much to bare.

I really don’t mean to waste all this water that I’m using by dragging the shower out longer than it has to be, but sometimes this is the only place I can come and not feel like life is passing me by. When I’m in the shower, I feel as though life slows down, so I can have a moment of peace to collect myself. Some people find this same sort of peace when they go to the bathroom and have to do a number two. For me, the sound of the water in the shower serves as a distraction from the loudness in the world and the noises in my head. That’s why I take a little longer in the shower. And even though it will only temporarily make me feel better, I still feel like I’m wasting water.

 -EAT

 I write as a form of healing for myself and others. If you enjoyed what you read, “tip the writer” by donating to Venmo or zelle @maronziovance or Cashapp $Gift2MaronzioVance