There's a cumulation when the water has risen so high that it closes, after much hesitation over the small protrusion of my nose, fully and finally over my face.
And in that cumulation there is little need to describe the solace, the purity of being utterly and without exception, alone in my bathtub universe.
There isn't any air, even. Just my dirt, what unneeded extras of me that have leaked into the water, and my tender, seldom so vulnerable, skin.
Sometimes I dare the sting of soap and open my eyes to look through the filter of water at a piece of the world I am denying in my thin-membraned fortress.
The mildew stains of the ceiling, strangely grey - not yellow, I don't even know what they are the ceiling is so high from me, were crawling with maggots.
For a second I was on the opposite wall of a directionless cube, pushing my back against warmed tile, pushing as far as my cube would let me from the swiftly crawling maggots.
But only for a second.
They're just maggots.
And I surfaced, heaved a breath at the stains, staring with stinging eyes at the oldness of my bathroom, the uneven plaster walls, the way they remind me of crumbling doorways I once laid my head in, glancing over the cheap porcelain of a sink that might once have been posh, escapist new and sterile, and glad for the realness of the dirt along the edges.
Then I held my breath again and disappeared to my water-world for one more moment of sheer and simple gospel solitude.