The Church Bathroom

I went to a conservative church with my family as a child. Every week, I would escape the hymns and the preachings; climb out of the sanctuary and into the women's restroom. I could still hear the music from there. It was muted, but I could make out memorized words while I sat on the floral-print cushioned bench in my stockings and ankle-length skirts. The restroom wasn't accommodating to injuries -- I once spent hours separating my pink knit stockings from a scab on my right knee. The blood stained my stockings, and the grouted floor, and the beds of my fingernails. I opened the wound and cried for help, but was heard only by clear water inhabiting yellowed toilet bowls, and by the dark specks of color lining insulated tile ceilings. I took hold of the stall door as my pink ribboned shoes clicked against beige and blue dappled tile, carrying me down the hallway to retrieve the church's first aid kit. I returned through aluminum stall doors to douse myself in hydrogen peroxide.

I don't remember the scab ever becoming unstuck, though, only the stubbornness of the white blood cells that had adhered themselves to me and my clothing, and the sting of peroxide fizzling my bleed away.

So many of my childhood memories lie between the walls of that church. My first love, before I was old enough to know what love is. Sitting in a pew with my hands folded in my lap, hours spent gazing into the starstruck eyes of a girl who smells like vanilla-pineapple conditioner and discount hair dye. Not realizing how I felt about that girl until I sit in the very same pew years later, watching her walk barefoot down the aisle in a thrifted white dress, glitter sprinkled across her cheeks and a smile plastered across her teenage-bride face. The red price tags still attached to the bohemian rugs lining the aisle are brighter even than the flowers she holds in her arms, or the makeup lining her eyes. The boy standing on the other end of the aisle looks nowhere near as pleased as his bride, and I wonder to myself a third time if it could be a shotgun wedding. Years later still, they don't have children

The first boy who claimed to love me -- proclaiming his affections for the first time in that same church hallway I once crossed to find peroxide and bandages. I stared at the navy blue carpet beneath us, at his eyes flickering to the beat of fluorescent bulbs overhead, and I wondered in what world I wouldn't have known how he wanted me. I am nine, and he is eleven, and he has been following me, taking pictures, talking to my friends, for two years now. The first time he tried to capture me I ran, but the last time I grabbed his wrist and bent it back, letting him go before his mother could see me denying her son.

I still expect him to turn up, sometimes, like a knock at my door will end in him defiling my home with memories of hydrogen peroxide running hemoglobin stains along the knees of my stockings. The first time I made out with someone I ended up locking myself in my bathroom afterwards; I couldn't convince myself I was safe anywhere outside of that expanse of white tile and tarnished chrome fixtures. My partner asked me if I wanted him to search the house, and so he did, turning over cushions and opening closet doors. He came back to gently knock on the bathroom door once he found no one there.

I will never have that church in my life again, but I still hide in restrooms. That boy who claimed to love me once followed me into the restroom; when I told my mother, years later, of all he had done to me, this was what most alarmed her. The stalking, the harassment, the photos he took of my then-flat chest the one time I dared to wear a low neckline; this all paled in comparison to his invasion of that deified and sacred, that consecrated space of the women's restroom. That he could dare catch a glimpse of those worn-through floral cushions or the blue paint chipping slowly off of aluminum stall doors, this was sacrilege.

When I was invited to the wedding of that teenage girl, I avoided the bathroom. The thought of stepping foot in that space which used to be so holy to me fills me with a certain type of burning dread, and yet, I recreate that space wherever I go. I saw a street preacher the other day, he was playing those old memorized songs, beckoning anyone nearby to join him in worship. I crossed the street to get away from him, but the lyrics created a stain within me of oxidized iron brown. I escaped back to the library restroom; checked the stalls before splashing my then-reddened eyes with water. The tears rinsed away, but the hymns didn't, and I was left holding folded toilet paper beneath my eyelids and watching the ways that stall-door graffiti changes with each fluorescent flicker of a ceiling light.

I do not know exactly why I chose the bathroom as my childhood hiding place, only that I did, and that I now cannot escape it. Something lies in that contrast between stone-tile sterility and feculent impurity, and it now resides within me forever. So few bore witness to what happened to me in that place, and even fewer believed me when I told them what that boy wanted from me. I think that when you teach a child that love looks like a place to hide, they will believe you.