The Bathroom Mirror Confession

Mirror mirror

House parties in Centre-Sud all sound the same after midnight: someone's playing guitar badly, someone's crying in the kitchen, someone's falling in love on the fire escape. I run to the bathroom, that sacred space where we go to remember who we are.

You're already there, sitting in the empty bathtub fully clothed, reading prescription bottles like poetry.

"Le métro est fermé," you say without looking up.

"I know," I answer, closing the door behind me.

We don't talk about why you're hiding or why I join you in the tub, sitting at the opposite end like we're in some porcelain boat. Through the door, the party continues: laughter, arguments, the crash of something breaking.

"In French," you say, "we say 'faire la fête.' To make the party. Like it's something we construct."

"In English, we just have it. Like it exists without us."

You pass me someone's anxiety medication, and we read the side effects together: drowsiness, dizziness, difficulty distinguishing between dream and reality. "Sounds like love," you say.

Someone knocks. We ignore them. In this tub, in this stolen moment, we're having our own party; quiet, strange, more honest than anything happening outside.

When we finally emerge, separately, the party has shifted into its melancholy phase. You disappear into the night. I stay until dawn, wondering if you were real or just another side effect of being alive in this city.