Text by Minato Usamin
Translated by Finch
I haven't taken a bath for a whole month.
I don't think ordinary people can understand this kind of situation: it's not that you “don't want to take a bath”, you just “can't”. One can imagine reasons to that: the bathtub could be broken, or you've got a cold. But in my case, I can't take baths because I can't physically move due to depression.
Depression is said to be a cold of the heart. There's the nuance, in these words, that while your mind is sick, your body stays fine. The nuance that if it's just your heart that caught a cold, then why don't you take a bath? However, if you suffer from serious depression, you can't take baths, you can't brush your teeth, you even feel bad in the water closets. Thanks to that, I've got more than two caries...
My mother has never been depressed; even if she can imagine what kind of illness it is, she has no experience of it altogether. She gets mad at me while I lay on my futon, postponing my bathing time. “Hurry up to the bathroom!”, she says.
“I can't.”
“Why?”
“Can't move.”
“Have you taken your meds?”
“Yeah.”
“Should be fine, then.”
To be honest, talking also tires me, but if I ignore her, she gets all the more angry. It does not matter how many times I explain it to her, my mother doesn't understand and keeps sayin' “hurry up”. I ran out of patience... or, rather, I got fed up of her orders and decided to take a bath.
The Bathroom Is My Crying Place
However, I don't have the energy to wash my body and face, or to soak myself in the bath.
So I took all my clothes off and laid on the bath tile, taking the washing stool as a pillow. Then, lying like this on the hard tiles, naked, I cried.
“Why do I have to go through such a hard time?”
I wonder if I should not commit suicide by drowning myself in the bathtub in front of me, but I'm not energetic enough to do so. It hurts on the tiles, but I have so little energy that it's even painful to roll over. After some time, I put my clothes on and lie down on my bed again. I've been crying all along.
Wet Tissues Are My Friends
Frankly speaking, it is wrong to say I haven't taken a bath for a month. I only pretended to do so, but I didn't wash my body and face.
Even if they just lie down without doing anything, humans do sweat and smell. If you don't wash yourself for a long time, you will recognize your own smell. As I don't often know if I'm smelling, it should already be a pretty smell when I get to feel smelly. Stink bugs and skunks are around the corner, right.
Even I do hate to smell, but I definitely don't have enough energy to take a bath. So here's what I did: I wiped my body with wet tissues.
Taking a Bath with All My Power
Doing so doesn't mean that the smell will be completely removed, but it becomes quite better. When I wipe my face and body with wet tissues, all my dead skin is falling off. I'm somewhat happy to be, in a way, rejuvenating.
Even with severe depression, I sometimes feel like I have some energy and finally take my bath on those days. When I do so for the first time in a while, it feels like the hot water in the bathtub is piercing me. In a word, it hurts. Just taking a bath consumes the power of my whole body, and I lie down on my futon again after that, but you can say it's already an improvement to take a bath for the first time in a month.
“You won't die if you don't bathe, but you will die socially”: well, thinking this way, I guess I was already socially dead, then. And if I happened to go out and get wet by the rain, it was as if I had washed my face, so I could forgive myself: “it's okay, you washed it with the rain”. Would've been perfect if it had rained shampoo as well...
<Profile of Author>
Minato Usamin
Dropped out education in my twenties. NEET for more than a decade, I've become an elite NEET.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/usa_mint3
To the original Japanese version;
https://www.hikipos.info/entry/2019/01/09/070000
