Beads of steaming water trickle down my skin. The air quickly thickens with heat, laced with sweet jasmine incense and last night’s dank cannabis pickup. Each droplet hits the tub’s floor like a mini stampede in the shower. The mellow buzz from my 3 a.m. bowl continues to lull my racing mind and soothe my aching limbs.

The night grows darker as Mitski’s melancholic ballads echo—yes, my heart is a washing machine and your dirty shoes are banging it up inside, Andrew. But wait, what if this is my internalized misogyny and decades of parentification acting up, causing me to feel the innate responsibility to fix, heal and nurture? Am I just a household appliance? When’s my next therapy session again?

The beads harden into bullets and damn, I’m in my feels. How do I recover from this? I reach out of the curtain for my phone, similar to a zombie emerging from the earth as I scramble to find my ‘bad bitch’ Spotify playlist. Ah, Megan Thee Stallion—exactly what I needed to remind me that “dick don’t run me, I run dick.” Can bad bitches be clumsy? Like spend-your-18th-birthday-in-the-emergency-room-getting-stitches clumsy?

Earlier today, I tripped on air in front of my café crush—I hate to say that it wasn’t the first time. A bout of the ‘cringe shivers’ courses through my body as I grab my face cleanser. Maybe my crush thought that I was just so enamoured by their beauty or severely itching for some caffeine in my bloodstream, causing me to gracefully stumble to the ground in their presence. I may as well have eaten my ‘pasta special’ and drank my dirty iced chai latte right then and there, surrounded by Adidas Sambas and Nike Air Force 1’s, on the sticky tiled floor. Now that’s grit, Toronto Metropolitan University.

With my skin exfoliated and my face cleansed, it’s now time. I scan my hanging caddy of bottles—short and tall, nearly empty and fully empty—for the container of perfect, purple-dispensing magic. There! Tucked away in the darkest corner, I see it, with trails of water softly glistening in the moody, amber light.

You’ve never looked so radiant, Schwarzkopf Bold Colour Wash in purple. You’ve been there for me this whole time, through all the highs, lows, trials and tribulations of life. And here I’ve been falling for—and in front of—guys with ‘male manipulator’ music tastes and leather-donning girls who just want to trauma dump and touch grass. Fuck, the city’s greenspace is rapidly declining—what if I do want to share what traumatic childhood events led me to develop such unique attachment patterns, all while laying on a fluffy patch of green grass as Radiohead’s greatest hits softly play? Ah right, that therapy session…

My prune-like fingertips grasp my shampoo bottle. I turn it upside down and squeeze the adequate palm-sized amount to not only wash my hair but refresh its violet hue. I firmly shake the bottle to the beat of some swanky French jazz. Then, as an act from Satan herself, my hand misses the purple glob and it swiftly plops onto my foot, enveloping each toe and not missing a single crevice. It’s in these moments when life feels like a movie. Quentin Tarantino would definitely be directing this scene—foot pans, toe zooms and all.

As the shamp-goo drips down, a small gap forms on its surface, resembling the mouth of a blobfish. I squint to get a better look—it’s Eminem and he’s popping off with “Rap God.” Bars upon bars are spat as the jazz from my phone speaker continues to play. Although this wildly unhinged mashup isn’t what I had expected, it’s perhaps what I needed. I respectfully wait for the rap-glob’s performance to conclude and luckily, there’s no encore.

My hair still isn’t washed but I feel oddly rejuvenated. I thank my bottle of Schwarz for her service and wash the rest of little Marshall down the drain. After processing the sheer chaos that had just ensued at the tip of my toes, my gaze once again locks on the shampoo bottle—it’s been you all along. ‘Poo and me against the world.’