{hiding in the bathroom}

i was at a thing last night and about halfway through, stuff stopped making sense. i was holding a cup and a sugar cookie and trying to focus on a conversation with a friend about the summer and about our lives, something about our lives, when the voices of all of the people seemed to clump together into a single physical mass that hummed and hung over the room and drowned out its own words. i imagined i was inside of a beehive.

someone waved from across the room and i felt a hand on my shoulder from another direction. i listened to a funny story and tried to laugh in the right places and i ate the sugar cookie in three bites and took another one. so many smiles and nods and words. how do people do this again? even in this familiar place with these familiar people, i'd seemed to have forgotten.

finally i slipped away into the bathroom, where i sat on the sink and picked at split ends for a few minutes. i thought about another time i'd hid in the bathroom--in grade 11 or 12 when i'd heard that a girl much bigger than me was looking for me because she was going to beat me up. i'd been tipped off by one of my friends who was in the know and i was scared out of my mind that she was going to break my nose and knock my teeth out.

i thought about how funny it was that now i was hiding in the bathroom from a crowd of people who only wanted to talk to me and smile at me and tell me stories about their babies and their work and their weekends, not beat me up. i reminded myself that unless i tripped and fell face first into a wall, i'd leave with all my teeth intact and my nose unbroken. and that helped a little.

however.

today, i am so happy to sit by myself a little while in my house with a cup of coffee and a few songs on repeat and putter away on some little watercolour pictures and household chores.