Parents’ Guest Bathroom

I sit still and silent, perched atop the wide white bathroom counter,

Feet in the sink

Back hunched,

Eyes wide wide open in a way that makes me avoid looking in the mirror.

I am six, ten, fourteen, eighteen, twenty two.

And I am always here, perched on the bathroom counter in my parents house.

I can sit perfectly silent for hours, picking my skin apart

Cell by cell,

With searching fingers and searching eyes

Determined to pick and pluck and pinch and pull the filth out.

Picking pimples, pus and pock.

A gargoyle, sitting inside the silent church instead of above it.

My pristine, perfect pulpit

Of a silent, white bathroom.

Pristine, except for whatever this dirt is inside me

I run my tweezer-finger tips all over all over all over

My skin, feeling before seeing the imperfection, the deformity, the disruption of order.

I know, I know,

If I could just leave it be then the blemish would heal, and by trying to fix the fault I’m only making it worse,

Making it redder, making it weep, making it scar.

But I can’t

Don’t you see I *can’t leave it alone.*

Over and over I run my fingertips over myself

Meticulously hunting any irregularity.

Gargoyles are made to protect churches

But I think they made me wrong.

Because all I can do for hours and hours and hours on end

Is pick at each little imperfection

Like it’s my purpose, as if the picking will protect me from whatever lies outside my bathroom chamber-church.

They say cleanliness is next to godliness,

So I must make my skin clean

By scouring and scarring away that foul matter, the muck I pull out of the microscopic pores across my person.

Maybe God does not actually care if I am clean,

*He* made me of dust and dirt.

But I care

I care.

Oh how cruel a god he is,

He made me with these searching fingers,

Made for ferreting out the filth.

He made me to never be clean,

And worse yet,

He made me to never feel it either.