On showering and mortality

In the morning, after coffee, I stepped into the elevator and was transported back to my childhood, in the small upstairs shower of my father's house. Smell is the sense most intimately tied to memory. This is largely because the olfactory bulb is part of the limbic system and smell is linked to memories in an intimate way, like the threads of a spider's web. It was a disconcerting feeling, to be standing in our small elevator with green carpet, dotted by almost indistinguishable white dots, industrial lighting overhead, the remains of a poster, half-torn, for an event that had already passed, lying on the floor, the plastic top of a cup, trash from college age detritus all around me and yet I was suddenly nine years old taking a shower in the upstairs bathroom at my father's house.

The scent left me with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, a physical pain for the past, for that child. In truth, I did not want to be that precise child again, still scared of the dark, of diving, of so many things. Nor did I want to experience that summer again, which was full of pools and wiffle ball but nothing to demarcate it as special. What I wanted was for the world to have all of its doors open again. I wanted to be rubbing a quarter sized bit of Selsen Blue into my hair, just as my father had shown me, oblivious of the string of disappointments that were yet to come. I suppose it's a lie then when I say I don't want to be that boy. I do, though what I really mean is that I'd like to be him with the knowledge that I have now. What a rush it would be to move back into such a body, cold, naked and alive with possibility. I imagine myself stepping from the shower into a room filled with the light of unexplored possibilities.

Of course, what I'm really saying is not that I've made poor decisions in my life, though I occasionally have, but rather I'm mourning that I've had to make so many decisions, to have allowed so much time to pass, like water beneath a fast moving ship. It's a peculiar thing, getting older, similar to that odd part on the bottom of the banana. Why is it there? As I stood inside that elevator for ten or fifteen seconds, I was reminded of mortality, that my days will one day come to an end.

I should confess that it takes a great deal out of someone to be surprised in the morning like that by the prospect of the unrelenting specter of death. I'm certain that happier things must have occurred after that in my day, but I can't remember them at all. I remember the white tiled shower, the fuzzy pinkish carpet just beyond the shower door, damp, because I wouldn't close the door all the way for fear that I might drown. I remember the smell of the shampoo, the silky feel of it in the palm of my hand, and I can see from here the shape of things to come.