Even When I'm Alone

 I think I was around twelve years old when I started to fear the shower. I remember taking showers when there was nobody home but me and our cat, just how scared I was of my surroundings. It didn't make any sense to me back then; I was home, and home was a safe place for me. But it's like that didn't matter at all, the environment was irrelevant.

It was the shower itself that bothered me. This was a time in my childhood when I started experiencing a variety of irrational fears of the unknown, supernatural things and stuff like that. For years, I attributed that fear to one particular virtually interactive manhwa short story I came across on the internet. There's no doubt that that terrifying story of body horror and unnatural sounds of the human body being crushed did scare the living shit out of me. But it wasn't the end-all-be-all that I had always thought that it was.

Because I had an epiphany.

showers 2.

They were always staring at me. Always analyzing every inch of my naked or barely clothed body, where my acne was the worst and if my breasts had gotten bigger since last time we went swimming in PE. Most of the time, they didn't even say anything; all I could sense was the looming presence of their eyes on me as they walked past me to the pool area, and I looked at one of my Friends in the eye and her eyes were fixated on something that felt weird she was looking at. And why did it feel so weird?

Why does it still feel weird? Whenever I take my clothes off to bathe my body, I feel the need to cover myself up – even in my own studio apartment, with no one present but me. 

And that's what my epiphany was about. The reason I still to this day peek behind the shower curtain to make sure no one is there watching is not because of the web horror series I accidentally saw as a twelve-year-old, and it's not because of the one scene in Psycho we all know. It's because I need to hide myself – from myself, from everyone. Even when there's nobody there.

Because my Friends could be there. They always were, even when I wasn't aware of it.

Any minute now,

ichigonya