Bathing is such a strange and vulnerable thing. You throw yourself in the water, and can't do much else but think. Sure, you can read a book, look at a candle, listen to music, close your eyes, but I did something I've never done before the other week.
I ate a pizza, in the bath.
It was a Friday night, and I'd gone to the gym - late; and my plan was to come home and then spend some time reading a book, soaking in the bath (with some magnesium salts, of course) - but the moment I walked in the door, my wife told me she was craving mac and cheese, and wanted to order in from the pizza place.
I said, yeah, okay, but I wanted to have a bath - and I'd take my pizza there. I can never say no to pizza. The doorbell rang. I yelled out when my wife didn't hear it, immersed in salty water, with no intention to get out, even if it was to collect pizza.
She delivered the pizza, right to the tub, and I ate the spicy pizza (my favourite type) while soaking away my aching muscles, and probably undoing everything that I had just done at the gym. I kept reading my book.
But, it was sort of a hedonistic experience I hadn't planned, or even had designs on before hand. When I first moved into this house and I realised that I could fit in the bath - one of the first things I ordered was a bath caddy, to hold a drink, to hold a book; and Epsom / bath salts.
It didn't take me long to realise how good a bath can make you feel, as vulnerable as you can be, soaked, naked, and alone. But that solitude and opportunity for reflection is great. It isn't quite like a shower thought, a pang of revelation - but a slower, more contemplative speed of thought, of putting together the puzzle that make up all of my fragmented ideas.
I've also learned that my iPad and its keyboard fit perfectly on the bath caddy, so it has also become a place to write that isn't my desk, the kitchen table, or the memory-foam beanbags we have in the lounge in lieu of a chesterfield couch. (And I'm still not sure why I want one!)
Sometimes, I want to do research on why some things are good for you, and why some things are not. But on the topic of brining myself in salt water for a good hour or more, I will just listen to my body, and ignore the act of research. Soaking in a salt bath is harmony; and a small, inexpensive slice of hedonism to enjoy at home.
I think I might experiment with eating other things in the bath - perhaps some dark chocolate - another pizza, but don't bring me any wine - I am planning to abstain from alcohol for the future days that I have, following a discussion with a friend.
Have you eaten a pizza in the bath, or am I alone in finding this joy?
This may just become a weekly ritual.
A weekly ritual that I cannot disconnect from my childhood, when I would be bathed by others, (without pizza) with the window open, and a clear line of sight to the chain link fence that was the boundary between the backyard and the beyond that would one day become my school.
I know not why I have this memory, this fear of being seen. No one ever did, but if they did, they never said they did. It still fills me with a sense of vulnerability and the shame that others might see my naked body and that they might be my future classmates if they failed a grade.
That house has since been demolished, but that chain link fence still stands, and the new bathtub, and new bathroom in that childhood home is in the approximate same place of Earth.
So, while I extoll the comforts of soaking in a bathtub and eating pizza, it is perhaps a paradoxical comfort to find from a trauma I'd rather not recall.
