They Get Mad At Me

“But I am just going to say it.

I used the upstairs public bathroom yesterday to avoid the smells of extreme circumstantial use by the homeless downstairs.

But then I was trapped upstairs in a smaller bathroom, unsure what was happening in the stall two doors over with two people engaged in longterm shuffling, groaning, and whispering.

People in desperate need find places to do things that the average people still trying to mask as ‘normal’ try to avoid if and when at all possible.

That’s me, for sure.

Don’t involve me.

Please, please, please – and definitely not directly.

If I cannot help, it is a torment to expose me.

Being wired to extreme empathy as a healer tells me too much information about smells and needs for sanitary assistance not being properly tended to.

What happened next was that the entire room suddenly became flooded to choking with one of the worst smells of long-baked unwashery that I have ever encountered.

I could not help but quickly (though quietly) scramble-fumble out of my stall and stuffing my face into my jacket just to be able to breath as I fled the bathroom for likely the first time ever not washing my hands.

I beelined, instead, to where I knew that I could find a courtesy sterile wipe and tissue by the clerk’s desk.

Reflecting back upon the maintenance care needed for that person being helped to use the bathroom – and clearly not being tended to consistently – threatened to send me into a despair cycle that I am still trying to dodge and out-distance on this second day returning for help with my paperwork.

I have since been having difficulty subduing a type of deep keening inside – for that person, for me, and for our society barely hinging on the brink of unnecessary and wasteful political disasters.”