A Home Pt 3

a bathroom floor

This post is part of a series in which I mourn the loss of my house, which I unfortunately have to sell, in real time. I’m tapping into memories and experiences from some of my favorite spots, drawing them and writing a little about what comes up- you can find my first and second posts here and here. Thirteen years is the longest amount of time I have ever lived in a home, and buying it gave me a tremendous sense of pride and safety: the walls are thick with my scent and my devotion. Below is a story about my relationship to the floor of this bathroom, but I want to make sure I mention yet another powerful experience I had in this room that I will never forget, which I wrote about here. Thanks so much for reading!

The floor of the Jack and Jill guest bathroom in my house is hideous.

It’s made of the same 11 x 11 linoleum squares that were installed in the kitchen decades before I bought the house, grayish white confetti dotted floor tiles best known for their work in elementary school cafeterias that sop up grease and grime and are impossible to keep looking fresh. These linoleum floors are actually the only thing I have hated about my house, but I managed to grow a thinly veiled tolerance for them over my years here, assuming the floors would be replaced with beautiful decorative tile when the kitchen and guest bath got professionally renovated.

Before I knew it, twelve years had gone by and I was nowhere closer to a reno budget than I was pre-Covid, and me and my ex had separated, and I was so disoriented I couldn’t figure out if my body was still attached to me.

But the bathroom floor was still hideous.

So I got to work.

I began the bathroom update when my ex had moved out but we were still hopeful for reconciliation. I painted the walls and the ceiling, covering up the dingy cream color with a bright, cool white. I replaced the collapsing rusted curved curtain rod with a shiny new brass one. I boiled the original vintage hinges of the built-in cabinet doors in baking soda to loosen the caked on paint, discovering in the process that the whole room had once been painted Pepto Pink. I sanded down the bite marks and ripped wood on one of the drawers of the built-in that Rosie had tried to demolish during the height of her separation anxiety years before. Invigorating the bathroom was tedious work but the transformation was evident after just one coat of paint. I could not for the life of me recall why it had taken me so long to make this room look loved. Maybe because it was the room I had spent the least amount of time in- my ex had used it more than I did.

Working top down like a raglan sweater, I was finally ready to tackle the bathroom floor when I had to suddenly pause the project. In the weeks prior, two relationships, the most life-altering one being with my ex, had come to an abrupt end. We would not be getting back together. It was the best decision, but it was also the most devastating one. I felt like a ghost. I didn’t know what to do with myself, besides lay supine and cry. Tik tok distracted me for hours on end. I know I ate food, but I don’t remember what kind. I caught the stomach flu from an infant at Friendsgiving and a week later came down with Covid for the first time, my four year streak of good health brought to an unceremonious halt.

When I was recovered, I was still a ghost, but a ghost in work overalls and the knee pads my ex made me wear when he taught me how to skateboard at the tennis courts down the street. I painted three coats of primer to dull the linoleum beneath and waited for each to dry, then I alternated painting the floor’s design with one stencil while the other dried in the tub between washings. The spray adhesive I used to keep the stencil in place on the floor gummied the plastic with glue and required a laborious scrub with a piece of rubber after each wash. Sometimes the painted image on the floor was precise after a pass with my roller, and other times the edges were thick and muddy, so I made my work slow and deliberate. I painted many of the star’s limbs carefully by hand around the borders and corners of the walls and the curves of the bathtub, my fingers toggling between the mechanical pencil I used to trace the stencil onto the floor and the brush I rested inside a jelly jar filled with paint.

The work was excruciating, but it reminded me that I was indeed still attached to my body. I took frequent breaks to collapse onto small unpainted sections of the floor and sob on myself. My head hurt. My eyes were swollen. I was sick of podcasts and too depressed to sing, yet I refused to work in silence, refused to be alone with my ache. I felt like I would never, ever, ever be done, as if the floor’s square footage was multiplying and I was meant to keep washing my stencils and painting my tiny triangles, back muscles burning and nose hovered over the floor, ad infinitum.

It seemed a fitting way to spend eternity.

I suppose stenciling the bathroom floor was a way to punish myself, in the way people suffering through heartbreak might drink themselves numb or smoke a remarkable number of cigarettes or stop feeding their body or refuse to answer their friend’s and family’s checking-in texts. My drug of choice was DIY, which sounds silly, but it’s truth makes a strange kind of sense. The coping mechanisms we reach for when we are desperate to stop feeling pain are the same things we are normally able to keep in some kind of balance when life isn’t overwhelming. Making has often been my crutch when I needed escape, when I needed a sense of control, when I needed separation from someone else’s want and a deeper connection to my own. Making and doing are meditative acts. They calm my anxiety. They can also be messy, inconvenient, time-consuming, frustrating, expensive. Painting a bathroom floor might not seem as self destructive as drinking two bottles of wine in an evening, but tell that to my arthritic back as I’m pretzeled in-between the legs of my home’s antique sink, struggling to paint the tiny corner of stencil wedged in the three inches between the porcelain toilet and the newly painted base board.

I don’t remember how long it took me to finish the bathroom floor, but somehow I did. Because nothing actually lasts forever. Not my projects, not my pain, not my heartache, not my fear, not my guilt, not my body and not my happiness either. I painted this floor when I was in the nucleus of my grief over my ex. Two years later I’m again inside the nucleus, but my vantage point is different. I’m no longer hunched over the floor, I’m standing on top of it. The floor looks beautiful and makes guests in my home squint down at it, scrutinizing my work (this isn’t tile? you actually painted this by hand???). The grief is different now, but the loss feels exactly the same. Visceral. Immense. I know it won’t last forever, but I also know I will be here again, because this is what it means to be alive.

I remind myself every single day that the extent to which I allow myself to feel my sadness is the extent to which I will be able to feel my joy. In this particularly heightened season of my life, I feel them both all the time, though neither of them is in the driver’s seat for very long. They are on a cross country road trip, navigating and napping in equal measure. They seem to be having a blast.

It is said that the life you want to build will cost you the life you used to have. This must be why the floor of my Jack and Jill guest bathroom no longer looks hideous. And it must be why I have to now say goodbye to it.