By: Kyla Dowling, Staff Writer
Shower crying. You’ve done it, I’ve done it, Archie Andrews did it on Riverdale when his dad got shot and then suddenly stopped crying to fuck his girlfriend in the shower. Either way, it’s a universal experience. But if you’re like me — someone who makes bad life choices and is weirdly emotionally sensitive for a Capricorn moon — you’ve cried in many a shower. Here is a second-person retelling of my stories so you can share my soap scum-filled pain.
- The house of an unfortunate hookup
It’s 9 a.m., you have a White Claw-induced hangover, and you’ve just woken up after spending the night having very mediocre sex with a guy whose idea of kinky is doing it doggy-style. There is nothing you want more than to take a shower immediately because you’re pretty sure he hasn’t washed his sheets in over a month. Why did you even spend the night, goof?
You get up off his floor mattress and go inside the bathroom only to find that there is one bottle in the shower. The label on the bottle reads: 36-in-1. Shampoo, conditioner, body wash, shaving cream, lube, chip dip, cat food, Dasani water — the list goes on. You weep for 30 straight minutes. He proudly texts you a week later that he got a noise complaint, but you know it’s from your cheeks being wet after sobbing, not anything else being wet.
- Your beach-themed bathroom in your childhood home
If you haven’t reverted to your 16-year-old self after returning to your childhood home for unforeseen circumstances, there’s something wrong with you. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something about that beach-themed bathroom that brings back high school trauma. You don’t remember your assignment due dates or how you hit like on a Tinder match’s Instagram photo from 2013.
Underneath the shell-shaped lights, as you hang your blue towel on a starfish hook and step into the shower, you revert back to your greasy high school self who listened exclusively to My Chemical Romance and thought that you looked like Hayley Williams when you dyed your hair orange. (Spoiler alert: you looked like a rejected Weasley). The shower’s stained with that Splat hair dye to this day, you heathen.
- Barbara Rae House, 4th floor
Allow me to transport you to the fourth floor showers of Barbara Rae House washrooms in October 2019. There’s hair clinging to the wall that you’re pretty sure doesn’t belong to anyone on your floor — unless their curtains don’t match their drapes. Someone left a cloth on the floor that likely moonlighted as a cum rag.
And yet, as you sob in the freezing shower about how your RA took the last of the Dining Hall chicken nuggets, you have never felt more alive. Why? Because Tanner— dear, sweet dad-jokes-and-Hawaiian-print-shirts Tanner, unironically-says-broski Tanner, does not recognize that you are in the shower. He thinks that he is alone. As he meticulously grooms his three-hair mustache, you are treated to him singing along to “Truth Hurts” by Lizzo. Trust me when I say it’s the best crying background music since “Ribs” by Lorde.
Honourable mention: McTaggert-Cowan Hall
There’s something special about the bathrooms of McTaggart-Cowan Hall. Sure, the Google reviews for this residence building might refer to it as having “a strong odor of marijuana” (sorry, my bad) and ideal for “dual monitor productivity” (which implies the existence of gamer boys in there). The showers are isolated, so you don’t have to listen to someone listening to Kanye and/or jacking off right next to you. The elegance and privacy of these showers are probably the last good thing SFU has ever done for students, and the residence was built in the 80s.
