T.P: Total paranoia — Emily Bollman

T.P, or: The Half Poopy Butthole Debacle

By Emily Bollman

Loving someone is hard, and it shows its difficulty in some pretty absurd moments. One of those moments is when you have to replace the toilet paper roll in their bathroom for the first time.

You start by looking around in their cabinets, pausing for one terrifying moment to have the thought, “what if there’s no more rolls??” This is scary, because the only reason you have to replace the roll is because you overestimated that last shred of TP clutching to the cardboard tube, and now you have half a poopy butt, and no more toilet paper.

The fear of not finding more toilet paper brings about a devastating barrage of unacceptable thoughts.

What if you have to wash your butt in the sink? Hmm? You’d have to somehow find a way to hoist yourself into the sink basin while blindly navigating the faucet for an adequate temperature, which you know you will overshoot in one direction or the other; exposing your sensitive rear bits to an artic blast or asshole incineration.

If you’re lucky, you may have a shower head option, but the downsides are catastrophic. Showers make a lot of noise, and you will be dealing with raised eyebrow questioning from your new lover.

You can either lie and tell them you have a hobby where you challenge yourself to figure out how other people’s showers work. The rationale: some showers are very difficult to figure out, kind of like an escape room, and you never want to be caught in a situation where you’re unable to solve the enigma. For example; sometimes you have to pull down a mysterious hidden latch in order for the water flow to switch from bathtub faucet to shower head. Very confusing. It’s all high stakes because this is THE defining moment that determines weather you’ll be taking an efficient, sanitary, adult shower that you could probably do you taxes in, I donno… or a dirty, smelly, stupid bath because you’re an idiot baby and now you have to take a bath like one. Or some showers have wonky dials with many futuristic settings, and you’re curious by nature so you must touch everything. OR there’s a secret button that turns LED lights on in the shower head which is awesome because it feels like you’re showering in a RAINBOW, but, in all actuality; this is an extremely dangerous design, because you have to turn all the normal bathroom lights off to see the rainbow at it’s peak rainbowness, and that’s simply not enough light to see the treachery around you. You will slip, and fall, and crack open your head, and pass out then drown then die, horribly. And, you never made a will! So you will get embalmed, and put in a casket, like all the other dead normies… And you’ll never fulfill your DREAM to be attached to the roots of an aspen tree, like a fertile flesh sack, and planted in the Rocky Mountains so that in hundreds of years after the collapse of the human race and the nuclear fallout that’ll go with it… you grow into an aspen grove, become the spirit of the forest as well as the largest single living organism on the planet; and give refuge to all the the wacky radioactive fallout creatures and hopefully a small cottage of mutant gnomes…

Or you can tell them the truth: That you had a half poopy butthole debacle… Now, every time they wanna wash off, they get to think about how you were just a few degrees off of practically shitting in their shower.

What are your other options…

You eye the bare cardboard tube and think about it… but you can’t flush that… Also your asshole is a queen and you’d never rough it against some crusty cardboard… Please…

Then you look down at your hand, consider it, and then proceed to almost vomit into it.

Eventually you DO find a roll in the corner where they’ve set up one of those adorable TP towers, and you wipe your half poopy butthole with an excessive amount of paper (because it’s a new roll, that you yourself retrieved, and so are entitled to this luxury). Once you’re done you try to replace the roll only to question the way in which you should replace it. Do they prefer to grab the paperfrom the bottom? Or have it resting for them on the top of the roll? If they see it resting in the way they do not prefer will they be annoyed? And will they know it was you who switched out the roll and by proxy be annoyed at you? And, do y’all have any other unresolved issues that this annoyance will bring up, tipping the newness of your relationship into a fight that will inevitably end with the two of you shitting in your own bathrooms for a week without talking to each other? You begin to self flagellate for even having the audacity to shit in their bathroom to begin with. Who do you think you are? When did you turn from shy pooper to poop oppressor? Shitting wherever you please and toying with the delicate balance of another person’s personal pooping spot?! The nightmare continues as you see that the only way to fix it is to come over with a new pack of 2ply and an apology, just to find out a week later that you have already used up the aforementioned roll, and now you’re stuck in the bathroom with the same good will as before to change the roll, but you’ve already forgotten which way they prefer it to go.

So what do you do? What roll orientation do you choose? You settle on the weak solution of placing the roll on the toilet shelf behind you in a half baked measure to not upset anyone.

You rise and turn on the faucet to wash your hands. Because you aren’t some no good sink skipper... but you went too far in one direction and the water freezes your nails blue so you yank the handle to the other side where it immediately cooks your skin; like that one time you were a 7-year-old on a road trip, and you had to stop to pee in a McDonalds for the seven hundredth time, and you were having difficulty reaching the sink because of how small you were, and the idea of patience caused your mother, who wished she’d thrown you into the Grand Canyon earlier, to snap. She hooked her nails into your armpits, forcefully hoisted you up to the steaming sink, stretched your arms out like they were exercise bands, and plunged your hands into scalding hot water! You cried out in pain so loud that people rushed into the bathroom from the main restaurant because they thought a murder was occurring, and then your mom told you that you embarrassed her and you’re still not over it these 16 years later…

Now your hands are throbbing and your childhood PTSD is winking at you from a top the TP tower in the corner but your hands are clean. And your pants are still on the ground, because, somehow that wasn’t a priority. You hike them up, take a deep breath in through your acne scars, and exhale every insecurity you’ve ever had in order to go back out there and face your new lover.

On your way out of the bathroom though… you realize that the measure you took to mitigate harm just looks like you were too fucking lazy to replace the roll at all! You’re just a shameful embarrassment who couldn’t be inconvenienced to take 10 seconds out of their day to display common courtesy. Bathroom etiquette is the sharpest indicator of your capacity for human decency. It says so much, and what you’ve done, says that you probably sneeze openly and throw salt on children in the hopes that it will melt them like slugs. You’re probably the type to not even flush too, huh! Wait… did you flush?

You run back to make sure the voices in your head aren’t right about you. You must heroically rectify the wrongs you’ve done to your new lover’s bathroom. And of course you flushed, duh! You’re a 23-year-old goddamn adult! You waltz out, pants held high, totally forgetting to rehome the TP that’s still on top of the the toilet.

You have a beautiful evening with your new lover full of cuddles and smooches and giggles and lies. The guilt begins to munch upon your soul. You can’t stop thinking about the toilet roll on the top of the toilet shelf. You store it in your brain next to the gum now crystalizing on your childhood bedpost and the people you lost in New York City when you used to give Times Square drinking tours. You’re convinced that as soon as you go over there your new lover will be soggying the toilet paper with their tears; “Why?” They cry, “why don’t you love me enough to do the simplest things for me? If I can’t count on you to do things exactly the way I like after never having told you how I like them done in the first place, how can I ever expect you to love me in the way that I deserve to be loved?”

When you find yourself back at their place enjoying a cup of coffee together, you feel the familiar burbling of bowels, signaling you must return to the bathroom of shame. As you open the door, you see the same roll, now half used, still on the self behind the toilet... and in that moment you feel loved, understood, and taken care of. You are happy, because they are the same type of neglectful menace that you are as well.

When you care about someone you want to be perfect them, but there’s no way to know how that person wants to be loved, and it’s not up to you to determine that. You don’t treat others the way you want to be treated, you treat others the way they want to be treated; because who are you to decide what another person wants? This can be scary because you get to thinking you’ll never do anything right because you can never know exactly what a person is thinking. The insecurity is terrifying, kind of like finding yourself in the bathroom with no toilet paper. The remedy? Lead with love. Dumb shit like toilet paper alignment doesn’t matter. When love is felt it allows room for understanding. So when you finally slot the roll into it’s home, you’ll be scared because you still don’t know what way they like the TP to fall, but since you did it out of love, the love will be felt. You can never go wrong when the gesture is; love.