You can see everything you need from the rise of the bathtub.
The ventilation window is ajar, just enough for the excess
steam to escape, to keep the breathing from tending to critical.
The bathroom mirror, in it you see the door, not me.
The eye can sweep boldly over the square tiles,
nothing starts on them, the view over there,
even if your gaze, slipping on the mist, sometimes
finds itself otherwhere than you expected.
There’s nothing here but bathroom things.
Upper rows of course, middle seats, that’s where
I asked for tickets for the American horror film Mirrors.
Even through the plexiglass you could see how
the ticket girl’s eyes, after she’d punched in my request,
went wide, her face clouding over.
Then she broke off the ticket selling process,
as if something had been ejected from the machine.
“But are you okay with being the only one in the theater?”
– the girl asked, her voice worried.
I hesitated with my answer, because the emerging suspicion,
which I just came to understand, I needed to play for time.
I shouldn’t even have gone in after this,
but because I’d started to get scared, I said
I’ll manage it somehow.
So do you close the door, or not?
There are arguments for both.
It’s not just the tile that can mangle your face,
or the lip of the tub.
In the end, you can only progress on the trails
that remain on it the longest.