Chameleon Inside the Shower Room

🦎

‘Chameleon Inside the
Shower Room’
by unfated
06.17.22

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

I think I am weird, but I am totally fine being one.

“Hah . . . haa, hoo . . . huhuhu.”

Strange thoughts wash over my head as I choke on my saliva. I look up at the window five inches above my head before I scrunch my nose. 

“Is she moaning?” ask the imaginary man inside my head.

“No, I am not,” is what I answer. “I am forcing myself to cry,” I add.

“You’re pretty sick,” he replies.

“Yeah. Pretty and sick.”

I turn on the shower and let myself get soak in the water. I keep on talking to the man in my head as I stare out the window. I am trying so hard to moisten my lacrimal glands to produce tears, but I just couldn’t. I already thought of the saddest moment in my life, the saddest moment in my mother’s life, the saddest moments of my father’s, of my brother’s, of my best friend’s—still no use. 

“Why do you wanna cry?” the man asks again and then I sigh.

He is starting to materialize inside my head. He is an old, bald man with sunglasses of two different color lenses hanging on his huge, sparkly forehead. His teeth are yellowish, and his mustache is untamed. He smiles wickedly at me.

Pretty sick, I thought.

No. Scratch that. He is just . . . sick.

“I was rejected,” I tell him as I apply this cheap, sweet-smelling shampoo my mother purchased at Walmart. I didn’t even like what it does to my hair. It makes it frizzy, and my friend told me I smell like a cheap prostitute.

But prostitutes are pretty, I am pretty, so I take that as a compliment.

“You should cry.”

I scoff at the man. From now on, I’m gonna call him Fernando. Why Fernando? Because he looks and acts like a Fernando.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to do, Fernando.”

“Wow. I have a name.”

“Good for you.”

He barks in laughter. Soon after his ear-damaging laugh, his body starts to form and he is pretty, and I mean pretty, fat—just like how I thought he shall be. His stomach seems like it will rip apart his red band shirt. I bet he drinks beer more often than water—that will explain why he looks like that. And if he isn’t a retired policeman, I’ll be utterly disappointed.

He is standing outside my six-foot-tall window. I don’t know if he is that tall or if he is standing on a ladder. I don’t know how his body appears on my wall. My imagination should be better than this. 

“So, kiddo, you were moaning—”

“I was crying.”

“Oh, my bad. Yes. You were crying,” he utters in a sarcastic tone. I just shrug it off. “You were crying because you were rejected. Is crying necessary?”

“Yes. I was told I should cry.” I start scrubbing my skin with an old, textured stone I found on the seashore last summer. “I should cry. My classmate told me so. My best friend told me so. My friend who pushed me to confess told me so. Isn’t that enough reason to call this necessary?”