Waking up on a Sunday morning is always a sensory overload. Especially here: a damp basement where mold and dust marry each other, and erupt into an unsavory odor of their own microbial consummation. Debris ejaculate smells like mildew. The air becomes an expansive womb that carries little dust-mold fetuses, bellicose zygotes that take absurd amounts of delight from being my nasal disasters.  Compound this with the fumes from oil paint still drying on haphazard canvasses, cigarette smoke, and the toxicity of my own breath, and you have the perfect recipe for respiratory apocalypse quarantined within these four walls.

It must be at least noon. The sun has managed to force its way through the army of dust that stands guard on the window pane. Morning sun cannot do that. Morning sun is lethargic, nursing its malaise at having to break the stratosphere. No, this was definitely noon sun. Or later, even.

I squint at the tiny window buried a few inches next to the door that gives out to the sidewalk. The frequent vroom of cars outside affirms that the world had not died in my sleep. Continue reading ‘the shower: prt I’