a new pink toilet seat.
and other coping mechanisms.
I bought a new pink toilet seat. Maybe it will fix everything.
For reasons I’m sure I don’t have to elucidate, I’ve been feeling world weary lately, but additionally brutal, I’ve been feeling home weary, too. In our apartment it feels like things are suddenly and rapidly growing worse for wear all around me. Water marks and shadows are leaching through the walls I painted when we moved in four years ago. Windowsills and baseboards are chipping and showing more signs than usual of baked-in city grime. That one closet door keeps falling off its tracks, my miracle-working painted canvas floor needs a fresh coat of paint, and the rickety windows are becoming more ornery with every passing day.
Four years into embracing the quirky charm of our very vintage bathroom, the unpleasantries that I’ve managed to overlook feel like they’re coming into stark relief. There’s the ceiling fan vent that deposits brown specks of what I can’t even bring myself to investigate, onto the top of the toilet. There’s the towel rod so thick with paint I’ve never determined if it’s chrome hidden under there or wood, the heat pipe the landlord left partially spackled with dark brown epoxy putty, to say nothing of a sink overflow so corroded that I have to actively stop myself from looking at it lest I begin to gag.
I remind myself that there are elements of this rental bathroom that I have successfully remediated: the ring of rust around the sink drain, the too-small shower curtain, the particle board medicine cabinet above the toilet, the awful plastic shower head. More troublesome lately though has been the faint smell of urine I catch wafting up from our toilet whenever I lock myself in the bathroom for a moment of quiet enter the room. I do realize I’m writing about a bathroom, but my fervent wish is for the bathroom in my home not to smell like the comfort station at the closest public park.