Now and Never

a study

Well, I’ve done it. This morning I used up a bar of soap all. the. way. to. the. very. end.

I don’t think you understand. I actually achieved what others only dream of. I didn’t combine soap dregs to other soap dregs to shape a new bar. I didn’t leave it in the tray to get absorbed into another bar or dissolve in the water/atmosphere. I made that shaved slivered soap flake last until I had to keep checking there was something under my fingers still producing cleaning properties, hoping it would get me to the final destination of bodily cleaning (which is my feet, in case you were curious). And with its last bubble of breath, the sputtering of the final production of suds, I made it. I made it. I didn’t put anything back in the dish! Can you believe it?? The soap simply disappeared and I felt like I was…free. Free from what, exactly? Let’s explore.

Do you ever have lame task amnesia? I think this might be akin to what some of us experience called “time blindness” which can make it difficult to estimate time or even perceive it. In short, for someone with this, time = “now” or “not now.”

But lame task amnesia or dysphoria, a term I have just coined, is a bit different. Sort of a hybrid of time blindness and chronic boredom. Or perhaps comorbidity is the word.

Anyway, Lame Task Amnesia is when the brain tries to fool itself into thinking that each start of a new cycle of lame task one engages in will never have to be repeated. Supplies will never need to be replenished. Each time is somehow the first and last.

Because the cycle is too boring to even think about? All thoughts on present day and future lameness are wasted? Because one cannot accept these things might take up space in one’s life? To be annoyingly defined, categorized? Who can say. But, though I understand the contradiction, when something I consume or use up in some way is new and whole, to me, it feels like forever. My options and possibilities are limitless. And it’s glorious.

Examples:

• I just went grocery shopping! I have so much food! I’ll have food forever.
  

• Ahh, the floor is clean. I’m so glad I won’t ever have to clean it ever again.
  

• The dishwasher is empty! I can put this mug literally anywhere. Freedom! The world is my oyster. I have ample room and I always will.
  

• New tube of toothpaste? Why would I bother squeezing from the bottom? That’s absurd; there’s so much here, I’ll never run out.

These are just a few. To use toothpaste as a metaphor, I’d say I’m definitely a middle squeezer and I definitely convince myself to cross boring bridges only when forced, bound and gagged, with no other option, to come to them.

Maybe it’s that I really live in the moment of mundanity. Of all the things to plan ahead for in life, the end of the toothpaste tube is so boring that I simply refuse. Plus it’s easier to hold in the middle. Maybe it’s a metaphor for getting what I can out when i can in life. All possible explanations.

So a new tube of toothpaste or bar of soap or use of an empty dishwasher is the very first moment of a new beginning. Life begins now. I cling to those feelings of novelty and repeatedly mistake them for permanence. This is life and life is right, right now.

Except for when I run out of soap. I never remember to put in a new bar for the next time. Who does? That’s insane. Once a shower’s over, it’s forgotten. I make my exit of cleanliness and never look back…until I’m faced with an empty soap dish two days later. The discovery of my misfortune is always made most inconveniently, when the shower is well underway and I am in dire straits. Oh great. Now what am I going to do.

Julian and I both have a habit of crying wolf when we need soap. In fact I actually learned it from him because, frankly, it’s brilliant.

As if on fire, we shout at the top of our lungs,

“HELP! HELP!”

Someone comes running, thinking we’ve slipped and are sprawled, blood from a head wound steadily flowing down the drain.

Sucker Loved one arrives—“What’s the matter??”

Very calmly and politely, our response: “Could you get me a bar of soap?”

Ha ha ha. Still makes me laugh. It’s an understood joke now. But when he first started doing it we felt duped because he was really little and quite convincing for someone so young, yet so wily. But I learned how effective it is and adopted it and we just know if you shout in alarm while in the shower, someone’s going to come running. Because we also know that jumping out of the warm shower dripping wet to soggily claw open a new bar of soap is a fate worse than death. Will do literally anything to avoid it.

When the time comes to replenish supplies or squeeze tubes or load dishes more intentionally (forced bridge to cross), I always think to myself, Again?? Didn’t I JUST do this? Logically I understand that soap and groceries do not spring eternal. But since my brain refuses to live my life by these things, the fact it must be repeated just does not compute.

However, since my brain works so hard to deny their importance, I am hyper-aware of these meaningless markers of the passage of time. So today, this momentous, historical if not miraculous occursion when the universe smiled upon me and I successfully cleaned my whole self using the last of my soap sliver, diminished to nothingness, I for once broke free from those constraints. Shattered the shackles. Nothing has felt so final! So complete! With so exact an endpoint! And I bask in it. If I died now I’d leave the earth at complete peace and satisfaction. Mentions of “doing what she loved” could be applied here.

But life has continued, time is still passing (I guess, in theory) and you may think it wise of me, that it would be doing myself a favor to go put a brand new bar of soap in the shower so it’s ready for me the next time, but— no need. I just took a shower. I’ll be clean forever.

Bar soap of choice

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