Published June 10, 2021

That’s my shower curtain. I love it. It has butterflies. A lot of them. It has colors. A lot of them. A friend picked it out for me. I love it. I think I told you that.

This shower curtain has special protective powers, although I need to come up with a better term for them. It doesn’t just keep water from soaking my bathroom floor, though it does that well. It’s also — dang, I knew yesterday how I wanted to phrase this — a layer of fabric and magic that allows me to get a sense of the outside world in exactly the right amount for all too familiar and increasingly common moods of mine. If you accept that this will be an imperfect telling of that story, then please read on if you’d like.

Sometimes, due to the cards I was dealt at birth, the idea of outdoors is enough for me. The idea of the outside world. This was true long before the pandemic. My skin could tell tales. So could my ADHD brain, for which the world is too fast and too loud. Then there are more eyes, hyper-sensitive to light and the reason why I am the only person squinting in home movies taken on gorgeous days long ago. There’s also the chain reaction of things my body does in certain weather when I ignore it and pretend to be normal. In short, what is a beautiful day for most people — and, I acknowledge, a beautiful day to me aesthetically — is often a piece of a bigger puzzle that, when completed, makes a portrait of me as having the opposite of what is usually meant by Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Yes. Bright, sunny day? Not necessarily the best thing for Carly, even with sunglasses, even with sunscreen, even with all of our extraordinary ways of keeping nature at bay.

I have curtains. I have blinds. I sometimes open one or the other, or both. Because of the particular deformity of the cornea I have lived with since birth (but was unaware of until my 30s), this is not a regular occurrence. And when I am working, sitting in front of a computer screen? There must be sharp contrasts in all of the right places or I cannot function without causing massive headaches and problems up and down my spine. So my studio apartment, which doubles as my home office, is a very dark cave much of the time.

There are days when I can go out and do the things (within limits). There are days when looking out my south-facing windows is the best I can manage. And then there are the days that require the help of my lovely shower curtain.

Can you see, through the fabric, that there is a window in my tub/shower space? It’s open most of the year to help in the fight against mold. A portable screen keeps out most, but not all, bugs and your larger debris. Sometimes the blinds are up. Sometimes they are down. Sometimes they are halfway, turned to the open position. When the window is raised, two things find their way into my bathroom: light in daytime, and sounds from the outside world.

This building, which dates to 1927, is a U shape. I am in the eastern upright. My bathroom wall faces the western upright. Interstate 5 is to the east of us. Traffic noise bounces off the western half of the U and enters my apartment, though not as loudly as when I open my south-facing windows.

There you have weekday sounds from an early afternoon in June (today).

My bathroom has a couple of places where I can sit and listen and breathe the outside air: the side of the tub, and a sturdy step-stool. There is also, as luck would have it, another place I can sit if I want to. It’s good to have options, isn’t it?

From my side of the shower curtain, I can hear the sounds and absorb sufficient proof of the existence of an outside world that’s bustling in a somehow reassuring way. I’ll have you know that just after 4 this morning, the traffic sounds from I-5 were louder than in the above audio clip. Less traffic, higher speeds? You decide.

Having a window open in June, or July, or August, or September, and sometimes in May, was not a thing I was in the habit of doing when I lived in south (or north) Louisiana. All of those things I alluded to above about the effects of nature upon the series of mistakes that are me? Much, much worse in a subtropical climate. So it was a joy to move to the Pacific Northwest and eat lunch on a rooftop in the middle of a July day (under an umbrella), or simply to be able to get by with open windows for most of the year. Portable AC helps in emergencies.

But back to my shower curtain. It is the perfect barrier between me and all of the irritants than send my health on a downward spiral, along with my mood, and yet allow me to appreciate the idea of the outside world. Even, to a certain extent, the partial reality of it. The value of that when I was recovering from surgeries two years ago cannot be overstated.

Plus, I love looking at it. It is at one end of a walk-in closet that leads to and from the rest of my studio. I can stand in the closet at night and get a wonderful glimpse of it.

This is possibly the worst thing I’ve ever written. I’ve mostly been alone inside this apartment for 15 months, so I’m a little off my game. So maybe expect revisions.

But although some of you have seen my shower curtain before, I didn’t frame it for you the way I’ve tried to do here. It helps me to have a special place where I can be and exist almost in nature, but not quite, without running the risk of things that could set me back for days or weeks. (Sadly, I will always have to live with the sun damage on my face, but luckily for me, there’s makeup for that!)

Don’t read this as a sad story (its content, not the quality of the writing). It is, imperfect though it may be, a celebration of how I, along with circumstances unforeseen, carved out a place that is somehow just right on certain days. And an expression of love for my butterfly-bedazzled shower curtain.