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Soapy Water
- Lady Ronit
- Nov 6, 2024
- 7 min read
I suddenly felt the scent of that soapy water on my pillow. Has it been three years? Not even, yet it feels like thirty. I don’t want to remember the smell of that bath bomb.
It was a very trendy, eco-friendly, vegan bath bomb, bought from a store whose name I’ve forgotten. Colourful and sprinkled with glitter. Everything about it was so disgusting. I wish I could forget the smell of that bathtub, I wish I could forget the disgustingly luxurious Regent Hotel in Berlin. And yet, I remember.
The passage of time in my consciousness is not fluid. It’s like the crash on August 5th, and later, like the stocks of Saudi Aramco. When you look at me from afar, it either falls or rises, but if you come very close, it stands still. I am frozen in time, and no one understands me.
It takes just one small factor, soapy water. It seems so insignificant. Yet it's enough to throw me off balance. Who slipped that same smell under my pillow? I wash my bedding every week, so if two years have passed, I’ve washed that pillow 104 times. One hundred and four spins in the washing machine weren’t enough to save me. So who slipped me that smell? Memory.
The smell of soapy water causes me sentimental disgust. I can’t say I don’t feel some strange nostalgia. It’s there, even though it’s horrible. Everything I ever loved in life was my tormentor. I think I don’t have a heart, but rather Stockholm syndrome with a radar that helps me find the perfect tormentor in a crowd.
Disgusting, skinny bodies entwined with another, slick with soapy water. If someone wanted to paint those moments, they’d have to paint a slaughterhouse. A slaughterhouse. That was the title of the painting I gave to my friend to forget. That painting was from the same series, from which he has one in his bedroom. The third one, Microbiology, I keep in my closet so I don’t have to look at it. I hate my works. I usually destroy my paintings because I hate what my hands created. Motherhood in such a state would be dangerous.
The title of the middle painting is unknown to me. Just like the room number where my most disgusting memory is locked. And I have many disgusting ones. A number I thought I’d never forget. I memorized it. Typical repression.
I remember so little from those years, yet every memory I’d gladly give to oblivion. Every memory seems like a dream.
I remember fries with mayonnaise and the white, very fluffy bedding. I remember the man I loved and hated. I remember my fifteen-year-old self. Foolish. Naive. Broken. I was just a child. I was just a child, so foolish and naive. So neglected. Why did no one notice my needs back then? If I had a daughter like myself, I would have locked her up, even if she hated me for it. But then again, can you cheat fate?
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