Version 1

As I stand in the diminutive rectangular prism, showered by water from the sprayer directly overhead, I tear myself away from pondering the questions of today and tomorrow and, for the first time, actually take the time to see.

In front of and below my eyes, the metallic snake sprouts from the wall, an oval of dulled chrome, distorting my reflection to the point of unrecognizability. From there, the silvered snake creeps skyward, to a point mere inches above my head, where it forms a handle, a white dulled by hourly use for several years. The handle enlarges and comes to a head, as it were, poked under the chin with dozens of holes, from which the water sprays. The rain from this oblong cloud cascades down atop me and streams to my feet, where it briefly pauses, as if to say goodbye, before it slides down, into the bowels of the building, through the city, and into the Lake.

This box that encapsulates me, the box where I find clarity, is barely broad enough for my elbows, let alone a single splayed arm. Below me, the floor. Mostly white, with some stains of a questionable light brown. The drain, a reflection of the head above, another metallic sieve through which the water cascades. A lone hair or two rest on its edge, perhaps mine, perhaps some past occupant’s. To my back, front, and left, the walls. Walls of tiles of a white I do not recognize. I hope that, when I was five or six, the tiles shone with the brilliance of the white marble they were meant to emulate. However, today, discolored by thousands of gallons of water and thousands of hours of cleaning, the white is unrecognizably flat, the same color as the grayed grout that binds this box together. To my right, the ivory curtain hangs, folds, and billows like a wave of cream, frozen in time. Above me, the ceiling. The singular source of light comes streaming from the center, a sun in a sepia photograph, in the center of the taupe sky.

I close my eyes, stick my head under the water, and return to my pondering.

Version 2 

Awoken from stasis by the sound of a handle twisting, I find myself propelled into the chrome tube by pressure I provided last week. I’ve taken this journey a billion times, a single minuscule particle working with those around me to accomplish the task. I snake toward the sky before quickly being ejected from the mouth of the tube. To me, the cavern I shoot through is gaping, but when I turn back and admire my provenance, I recognize it as but one of dozens of such origins, littered across the surface of an oval high above me.

I crash headlong into the skin of he who turned the handle, and stream down until I reach the splotched floor. I flow towards the metallic grate in the center, and hesitate for one last moment on its edge, peering up and taking in my surroundings. Far above, a sun shines from set deep within a milky white ceiling. Looming on three sides are pearly tiles and grayed grout stretching upwards into oblivion. On the fourth, I get a fleeting glimpse of the outside world under a rippling facade, stretching forever upwards until it, too, meets the sepia sky above.

Process Notes

This was my second go at this assignment, as you’ll know if you saw the old one. I chose to write about the shower, because it is where I do some of my best thinking, including about the issue I’ll be tackling this quarter, and including the moment of inspiration that led me to write about the shower itself, as it turns out. I wrote it out in the order I did for a couple conscious reasons. The first paragraph follows the path of the water from the moment it enters the shower to the moment it leaves the shower in order to add vibrancy to the scene. This is necessary because nobody really experiences a shower without the water, so I figured it was necessary to add its presence. The second paragraph forms the shower itself, hopefully exhibiting the baseline experience of the dormitory shower: a slightly gross, whitish small rectangular prism. By describing the four walls, the floor, and the ceiling, I try to emphasize both what an occupant sees (the gross off-white color) and what an occupant feels (confinement).

In my second version, I address the idea that water is necessary for the existence of the shower as we experience by examining the shower from the perspective of a water molecule.