Showering with the EX

I have been showering with my ex’s shower gel. Not because I miss him. Not because I can’t afford my own. But because I found it in the toiletry travel bag he left behind and it feels good to wring every last drop out of something that was never as precious as I once believed. Waste not, want not… with a pinch of poetic revenge.

It’s ridiculous, though, how the smell takes me back. For thirteen years, that scent was his signature. It meant slow mornings where he would turn getting dressed into an Olympic event. First the towel draped wanderings. Then clothes sprawled across the bed as if they needed a nap before they could be worn. And the shoes… always untied, as though he thought shoelaces were optional for grown men. I felt less like his partner and more like his unpaid babysitter.

Still, memory has a bad habit of airbrushing arseholes once they’ve left. I almost fell for it years ago with my ex-husband, the same man who walked out on me after eight years of marriage and a newborn of two months. All it took was his slick voice and a “maybe we can try again” look. But then came my condition: confess the lies you spread about me to our friends and family, and then we’ll talk. Well, he didn’t. You don’t need a crystal ball to know how that ended.

Now, every time I lather up with that blue gel from my second, 13 year long mistake, I’m reminded that I was worth more than untied shoelaces and unread messages, more than constantly taking the seat of second place to what fed his ego, more than lies whispered to friends and family, more than the cowardice of men who can’t face their own reflection. That scent no longer belongs to him. It belongs to me. It’s my ritual, my reclaiming. Call it petty, call it poetic justice, either way, it works and it is mine!

And yes, the bottle will run out. The last blue squirt will hit the sponge, I’ll scrub, rinse, and chuck the plastic into the bin. That’ll be the full stop to this chapter. Sometimes closure doesn’t arrive in a teary conversation or a dramatic goodbye, sometimes it comes from an empty bottle and a decision not to replace it.

The difference between him and I is simple. I have sat with my pain since I asked him to leave. Eight long months of silence, solitude, and the kind of loneliness that can strip you down to the bone. I let it burn me clean instead of burying it under noise. He hasn’t. He will outrun his accountability until it finally corners him, and by then it’ll be a mountain, not a pebble. No shower gel on earth is strong enough for that.

Oddly enough, I’m grateful. Not for him, but for the fire he forced me to walk through. I came out scraped and scarred, but my skin feels more like my own now. I don’t need anyone to tell me who I am, or how long I should take to get ready, or whether my shoes are tied.

So tonight, when I step out of the steam and hang my towel, I’ll carry the scent with me, not as a memory of him, but as proof that even small, strange rituals can turn survival into strength.

Because sometimes healing isn’t loud or poetic. Sometimes it smells like cheap blue gel. And if that’s enough to remind me that I made it through, then maybe it’s also enough to remind you that whatever you’re dragging around, it can be turned into fuel.

The trick is to stop waiting for someone else to clean you off and realise you have always had your own water, your own sponge and your own way out of the muck.