Getting Ready

The apartment is empty when you emerge from the bedroom. A note on the kitchen table from your cousin reads:

Popped out to the store - didn’t want to wake you. Make yourself at home. See you at lunch! -Emily

A glance at the clock on the wall tells you that you have the place to yourself for at least two hours. Having spent to much time alone in recovery at the hospital, the solitude doesn’t intimidate you. In fact, having a bit of time to yourself as you explore your new environment is appealing.

After relieving yourself in the washroom, the pang of hunger in your stomach reminds you that food is your first priority. With your energy stores low, but your hunger high, you grab yourself a bowl of strawberry yogurt, a banana, and a glass of mango juice. Back home you had always been a cereal man, but the looks of the food here entices you to try new things. You even spend some time mixing flavours, dipping the banana in the yogurt and sucking it off, bringing a pleasurable experience both in flavour and tactility.

Conscious that you are a guest, you clear and wash your dishes, leaving them on the rack to dry. While you have the sink full, you wash the dishes left by Emily as well. Might as well start the day off on a good foot, you tell yourself.

The kitchen tidied, you explore the living room. Emily and Katie have a good collection of movies on one shelf. You skim by the action movies, something about them just turns you off. Maybe it’s the trauma from the accident. Your eyes do linger on Dirty Dancing, thinking that it might just be what you’d chose to watch that evening. Something lower key, something with character development.

You return to the washroom, this time to shower. After disrobing, you stare at your body in the mirror. The beard on your face from your time in the hospital is utterly unattractive. Dismaying that you don’t have a shaving kit (it’s probably destroyed in your bag, and can’t be bothered to look for it), you check around for a solution. You find a can of Nair, a hair removal cream you’ve heard about. You read the instructions and give it a shot, covering the beard with a thick layer of the cream. You wash your hands and wait.

While you wait you take inventory of your face. You are a slender man, good cheekbones, excellent head of hair. Had your eyebrows always been that bushy? You can’t recall ever plucking them before, but you swear you would have never let them get so unruly. A sense of embarrassment rises in you as you remember all those nurses and doctors seeing you in the hospital, you are sure that they were all judging you. While you can’t fix the past, you can certainly fix the future.

Estimating that three minutes have gone by, you get a wet cloth and gently wipe away the cream on your face, revealing, to your delight, the smooth skin you were hoping for. Once you had cleaned up the Nair, you grab a pair of tweezers and go to work on your eyebrows.

And it is work.

You feel conflicted, knowing that you had never plucked before, but somehow also knowing exactly what to do. Maybe a memory got lost during the accident. However it happened, your precise hands soon have your eyebrows looking sharp and trimmed with a soft angled arch, just the way you like them.

You wipe down the sink, removing all evidence of your efforts, then step into the shower. The water feels divine. You shampoo, condition, and lather your body with the body wash on the ledge. By the time you turn the water off, you feel like a new man, ready to take on the world.

A fresh fluffy towel dries you off, and you once again find yourself stepping into the panties, pyjamas, and robe from your aunt’s room. Leaving the washroom, you pad into the living room and flop onto the couch, grab the remote, and begin to scan through the channels.

Daytime television has never been your favourite, but when pressed you could always waste time on one of the twenty-four-hour news channels. Today, though, you are enticed into a celebrity gossip show. A starlet is rumoured to have broken up with her boyfriend. An inside source has juicy details! It’s just so interesting!

So engrossed are you in the story that you don’t hear Emily come home until she closes the door behind her.

“Hi Em!” You call back to your cousin, eyes not leaving the screen.

“Alex?” She says, a little shocked, “what are you wearing?”