The Second Bathroom

Lyrics

Up the main stair, second floor, the heart's own hum.
Where the floorboards know your weight, know where you've come from.

Down the long hall, past the eyes in The Portrait Hall that follow you.
Past The Eldest Daughter's Room, a sharp perfume leaking through.
Past The Son's Room, where a radio from 1978 is always playing low.
Then the cold spot, the door I always know to avoid.
The Sick Room. A silence that eats sound. I feel the pull of its quiet gravity, and turn away.
Not that threshold. Not today.
The goal is the noise, the heat, the rush.

The steam hits first. A wall of hot, wet history.
Black and white hexagonal tiles, a cold, hard galaxy underfoot.
This isn't a sanctuary. This is a junction. An intersection of elbows and knees.
The clawfoot tub is an iron boat in a porcelain sea, holding the memory of every frantic bath.
The single pedestal sink, a stage for arguments over toothpaste and time.
This is where you learn another person's edges.

This is the engine room of the morning.
The clash and the splash, the shout and the warning.
In the shared mirror, my face over his, his face over hers.
A hundred years of hurry, blurring the years.
The steam keeps the score, the steam holds the heat.
The frantic, loving rhythm of bare, running feet.

I remember a fight that never happened, about a lost barrette. The tension left a chip in the tile by the door, I can still feel it.
The medicine cabinet mirror opens on a different room entirely.
A perfect, silent copy of this one, clean and unused, where the nickel isn't in the drain yet.
A bathroom inside the bathroom, waiting for its first ghost.
The water that runs from the tap ran for a boy in 1928, for a girl in 1993.
It's all the same water.

The high, sharp shriek of a comb dropped on the tile floor...
has the clean, bitter taste of carbolic soap on the tongue.
It's the only flavor this room has.
The nickel in the overflow drain is the anchor.
The one still point.
It feels the vibration of every slammed door, every slammed heart.

This is the engine room of the morning.
The clash and the splash, the shout and the warning.
In the shared mirror, my face over his, his face over hers.
A hundred years of hurry, blurring the years.
The steam keeps the score, the steam holds the heat.
The frantic, loving rhythm of bare, running feet.

And then the steam clears.
The mirror shows one face.
The footprint on the damp bath mat belongs to no one.
Just the drip. The echo.
The wait for the next rush.