She knows how to feel lonely in the bathroom – a soapy kind of melancholy on bathroom tiles that possess an alien gravity. She squats down and slowly hugs her knees to her chest. A foetus, but not quite.

Are my knees feeling my breasts or are my breasts feeling my knees? she wonders, switching the feelings around in her head. Knee-consciousness and breast-consciousness seem to meld, adding to her ethereal confusion. The film of shampoo robs her skin of its citizenship; fingers run across bumps, pores, follicles that live on someone else’s body, someplace foreign. So this is what it feels like to not belong to yourself, she thinks.

She studies the body that she does not own – bitten fingernails that look like translucent chips embedded in ten individual prunes; (only barely) callused palm from playing ball. Where does her original skin stop and her tan begin? I’d laugh if I were really this white everywhere, she says to herself, but checks just to make sure she hasn’t reverted to that pale, pallid, off-white. The tan, like many other things, was just another way for her to disguise her shame.

Shame in a pale, pallid, off-white package.

There is no one else in the bathroom (obviously). Her arms hug tighter around her calves as she curls her toes reflexively. The tighter she hugs, the faster her skin slips from under her fingers a desperate attempt to escape.

A bathroom kind of lonely.