Sunday, September 25, 2011

One never knows what impact something will have on them.  Take, for example, my girlfriend who I learned something new about this morning.  Getting ready to head out the door to go to an event, she asked if she could jump in the shower while I finished getting ready.  Us being friends and both women, I told her that would be fine.  That’s when things got a little…odd.

Blow-drying my hair, I continued chatting with her as she climbed in the shower.  That all seemed normal enough, but what she did next struck me as odd.  The bathroom where we were getting ready had an antique ball and claw tub that had been converted into a shower stall with several suspended shower curtains surrounding the tub.  Naturally, I expected my girlfriend to pull the curtains shut prior to turning on the water.  But she didn’t….

Instead, she continued talking with me as she turned on the water.  As the stream began pelting against her back, water droplets began to splash all over the place.  I couldn’t help but wonder why my girlfriend wasn’t closing the curtain to keep the water from making a mess.  I decided not to question her, thinking that she was waiting to finish her thought prior to closing the curtain.  But I was wrong….

As soon as my girlfriend finished her train of thought, she didn’t skip a beat and moved onto a new subject, the thought of closing the shower curtain never occurring to her.  More water splashed here, there and everywhere, me taking it all in, not questioning aloud, though in my mind, I was wondering what the heck was amiss that my girlfriend wouldn’t think to contain the water inside the shower instead of coating the bathroom with it. 

We continued to chat, water still escaping the shower area, coating the floor, sink and wall.  I found this absolutely fascinating and wondered what had possessed my girlfriend to want to shower with the curtain opened.  As if reading my mind, she told me the reason.

It seemed that years before, she had watched an X Files episode that had so freaked her out that ever since, she hadn’t been able to close a shower curtain…just curtains, if the shower had a door, she was cool with closing it…but not shower curtians, even if they were clear.

Since I had loved watching the X Files while the show was running and had seen all the episodes, I asked my girlfriend which one had left such a lasting impression on her.  She told me it had been the one where mold had been the main culprit of the show.  First, there had been a guy who went to use the toilet.  And when he sat down, mold overtook him, completely covering him in the process. 

Ew!

Later in the episode, another person had gone to take a shower.  When they drew the shower curtains closed, mold had overtaken them, sealing them off from the rest of the world, forever consuming them.

Double ew!

I totally recalled the episode my girlfriend had referred.  I also remembered how gross it had been.  My girlfriend is a capable person who is in control of her life, not at all obsessed and usually not so affected by random things.  But somehow, that X Files episode had gotten so under her skin as to leave her incapable of drawing a shower curtain closed all those years later.

When her shower was done, my girlfriend did what she said she usually does, bent down and mopped up the water spillage with a towel.  As I watched her, I couldn’t help but be perplexed by her reaction to a show she knew hadn’t been real.  But then I stopped to think about it….  Being honest with myself, I recalled how it took me years to overcome the paranoia that a shark was going to come out of the bathtub drain and eat me after I saw the movie Jaws.  Or how, if I pulled a shower curtain closed, I was certain that I’d hear the Psycho music and have a knife rip through the curtain only to tear into my flesh.  So yeah, although my girlfriend’s reaction was odd, I completely understood the irrationality of it.  How it could be all consuming.  How it could have such a powerful hold over here…even after all these years.