Oh bathtub you were lukewarm! Why?

I don’t really ask anything of you. I like you just the way you are: our relationship is just perfect. I see you once a week – maybe once every two or three weeks if I’m really busy. I just want a special bath once in a while: just me and my bathtub and that special time we share.

Bathing is something very intimate and special for me – I can tell it is for both of us, dear bathtub – but the thing is, I realize now that I’m developing feelings for you. I can’t handle the casualness of this relationship.

It’s not that I want anything to really change mind you. I don’t really want to bathe more often, or visit the factory where you were made, or delve into the history of who you cleaned before I came along.

It’s just that I’ve realized that, having gone this far, if I found out you were cleansing someone else, some stranger, I would be really hurt. Then where would we be? I have to live – and work – in this apartment with you!

I would want to scrub you with bleach to within an inch of your life before I could stand going near you again. Our relationship would never be the same, and we could never go back to that easy casual shower routine we had before the bathing thing came along.

I know, I know, I’m gone to Vancouver a lot, and I sometimes must stay in a hotel with another bathtub. Quite frankly, since you came along I don’t bathe in those other tubs – I only shower.

Even though I’m not ready for anything approaching real commitment – I must admit I really do want another bathtub all my own someday. I’ve been renting for a while now since selling my last condo, and I don’t want to remain a renter forever. When that day comes – I have no idea yet whether you will be The One I take out a mortgage with. Maybe I’ll want a deeper, longer tub, with jacuzzi jets. Who knows? Anything could happen, but we’ve shared some really nice hot baths up until now and I gotta admit you’re on my mind a lot.

Dear bathtub – it’s not like I want to pick out a new shower curtain with you or anything. I just want to know if maybe you are perhaps thinking the same thing: that our relationship is fine the way it is, and neither of use will go screwing up any future considerations by indiscriminately bathing elsewhere?

I would like to know if you consider me a candidate – in the future – down the road – as a possible One and Only bathing beauty.

If not, then maybe we could go back to our friendly day-to-day showers, before it’s too late and one of us (i.e. me) gets left in the cold.

Roman Bath photo by MarkHillary

Rubber Duckie photo by meg@n!!

Blowing off a rainy hill workout to sit at the laundromat. A group of runners trots past, headlamps bobbing in the winter evening’s darkness.

Laundry Day by Peekature Studios

<<Guilt>>

OK, that passed quickly.

Hey maybe this is a good place to meet single men. Or women. Or not.

Nevermind.

Maybe the resolution last year would have been more successful if it been “Remain celibate and joyfully single” rather than the trap-door-open-for-sex-and-entanglement wording: “Remain joyfully single.”

Reverse-engineering, as far as she can tell, means taking something apart to see how it works rather than building it from scratch.

She’s discovered she reverse-engineers her relationships: she jumps into full-bore couple-hood with no user documentation. She falls in love right away and imagines herself waking up with him every morning. Convinces herself that her life is imperfect without him, impatiently waits for him to Be Exclusive. Stops seeing friends socially, drops any other romantic prospects. Imagines a life of comfortable domestic bliss.

(One of these days she’s going to realize the guys giving their assent to all this are just as unlikely as she is to be candidates for Lasting Happiness.)

Then, one day, sooner rather than later – maybe two months, maybe six months into it, she looks at him with renewed clarity. He’s got his eyes tightly closed the whole time they’re having sex, or he really does look like the cartoon guy from MAD Magazine with a vapid smile and even more vapid personality, or he won’t stop inflecting the end of his sentences up like a teenager when he speaks, or he’s petting her like he pets his dogs, or he tells his jokes too loud in restaurants, or he asks to borrow her car for the umpteenth time, never filling it with gas.

At that point, she’ll look at him with complete transparency, and a switch goes from “On” to “Off,” and just like that —it’s over. Pieces of a hurried relationship all over the floor; she has no clue how to put it back together again.

He usually senses it. The whole facade is deconstructed in a heartbeat. She tries to recapture the magic, tries to remember what she saw in him in the first place – tries to backtrack into the Just Dating stage; realizes she’s already given her heart away and invested her emotional capital in a fantasyland of Couplehood.

He of course is usually completely mystified, left with pieces of his heart and his manhood strewn about in little pieces.

Her phone rings-his name comes up on the screen-she startles; the drone and hum of the laundromat has lulled her to a stupor. She tries to perk up, moves to answer, but her plastic smile doesn’t make it to her eyes and she loses her nerve. Instead, she hits the “ignore” button and folds her towels.

The running group trots past again, going back the other way this time. She lugs her laundry home, pulls out her runners and straps on the headlamp, seeking redemption in the shiny streets.

(Then again, maybe she just hasn’t met the right one yet.)

Three workouts in 36 hours. Not enough to outrun the deafening silence of still unfulfilled dreams.

Slick with sweat last night, no window open wide enough. Perimenopausal? Flu? Nerves? Restlessness?

We all have our reasons for running. Mine are no different and no clearer and no more mundane or less important than anyone else’s.

The hills slay me. I choose them. They are my poison. Post-marathon, there’s no training group and I am finally alone. I forgot how much I love to go inside – deep inside – when there’s no chatter and laughter and distracting us from 3 hours of tightening hips and growing blisters, averting our gaze from the boredom and the pain and the effort.

I love the boredom and the pain and the effort. I love the wet soaking through my jacket, I love dancing around puddles and the thrilling little shock of cold wetness on the toes. A surprise – I find a fresh alley, a new tree, a shiny streetglow under a lamp that wasn’t on at this time 3 months ago. I find a new insight, a poem written and forgotten before I see warmth again, a story plotted with characters and lost to the search for a bagel back in the cozy smallness of the kitchen.

I am naked when I run alone.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ-5SYqp8kI&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&border=1]