If being single in your thirties wasn’t already humbling enough, there’s always the slow erosion of dignity.
Author’s note: This essay mentions references to Harry Potter, and was written at a time before it became known to me that JK Rowling had outed herself as a malicious transphobe, bigoted TERF, and generally awful person to be avoided. Trans people have always existed, and will continue to always exist. Trans rights are human rights. Long live the trans community.
As I lay nestled in my bedding in the dead of night, suddenly enveloped in the warm rapid of urine collecting around my body emitting from my overnight guest, I wondered how I found myself in this position.
In my early twenties, I prided myself on having a healthy sex life; it felt like the appropriate rebellion after growing up in a repressed religious state commanded by a god-fearing institution which instructed you to confess to your elderly male bishop each time you self-completed. Needless to say, I took hearty advantage of slutting it up once I realized that I could do so without receiving an infernal punishment that awaited for me in the afterlife. That’s what your early twenties are for, right?
But in my rocketing advancement to the checkpoint that was my thirties, my body, self-esteem, and sex drive all withered and languished under the mounting pressure of trying to simply manage everyday life, and I found myself latching much more onto emotional intimacy rather than physical. As such, I did not have many overnight guests, the primary reasoning being a deep fear that once I got them into my bed that I might realize that having a baby would distract me from all my existing problems.
Still, every once in a while, I needed to admit that there was a compulsion for physical affection. Which was how the man now filling my sheets with the evacuation of his bladder found his way into my bed.
He was one of only two sex guests I had entertained so far in the year, and I was pretty happy with the arrangement. Normally, I would begin planning not-so-subtle wedding scenarios if someone even just warmly smiled at me, but this person and I were different enough that there was none of that on my end, which, for me, was as rare as finding a white stag.
“Stop!” I shrieked, jarring the White Stag from his drunken hypnosis. He climbed off of me, and even in the dark, I could see him stupidly turning in circles trying to find the bathroom.
“Through the kitchen!” I hissed, launching myself off the bed.
“Don’t look at me!” he begged, covering his face with his hands as he lumbered in the direction of the bathroom.
Heaving a deep sigh, I lifted my mattress and ripped the sheets off of it like they were on fire, which they may as well have been. I wrapped them up with my bedspread and crammed the foul heap of bedding into my washing machine, slamming the lid down like I was charged with containing the contents of Pandora’s Box inside of it. Then, still with my own body covered in piss, I ran back to my bed and started racing my hands along the mattress, feeling blindly for even a remotely damp spot that I might have to empty the entire bottle of bleach onto.
To my profound relief, I found none. This was perhaps the only saving grace of having a brand new bed set that was less than 48 hours old; the materials were still stiff, and thus had retained the liquid that had been deposited onto them. Just to be safe, though, I belligerently doused the mattress down with 409. Each time I pulled the trigger, I imagined unleashing a fiery inferno from the canister, instead of the watered down cleaning solution that limply streamed out of it. Then I went to my closet and pulled out a fresh blanket and top sheet to put down on the mattress, suddenly growing very worried that I might have to dump them into the washer later as well.
The toilet flushed from the bathroom, and I thought about ejecting the urine vandal from my apartment. But it was 3:38 in the morning, and as annoyed as I was, I couldn’t toss an embarrassed, drunk man out into the street, even if he had just peed all over me and my brand new bedspread. It wasn’t a malicious act, just an obtuse one.
Nonetheless, never did I think that I’d have to rationalize not kicking out a man who had just peed on me.
Once he exited the bathroom and after we awkwardly side-stepped one another, I bolted through the door and aggressively scrubbed myself down, cursing the entire time. After toweling off, I put my hands on either side of the sink and gawked at the aggrieved expression on my face in the mirror, checking to see if at any point the darkness that made me seem like a walking harpy would escape through the very tiny holes in my pores. I massaged the bags under my eyes, which were sure to worsen after this jarring incident kept me awake for the rest of the night, for how could I go back to sleep next to someone who now had an immediate history of pissing on me as I slept?
I checked my teeth and decided against flossing, which reminded me that I still needed to see my dentist. Then I breathed a deep sigh, scowling at my Mirror Self. She was incredibly disappointed with me, and was not hiding it.
I shut off the light and left the door slightly ajar for the cat, then tiptoed back to bed. The White Stag was already asleep again with the temporary bedding I had procured. I stood next to the bed, glaring at him, before deciding that I was too tired to take a stand in this situation. After climbing under the covers, I grabbed my phone and texted my sister and three of my closest friends with the same message:
“thought I could go through life escaping being peed on, and that was incorrect”
The next morning, I awoke to a flurry of messages from these four people asking me what happened. My friend Dash texted me exclusively in caps, saying, “SARAH THIS MAN OWES YOU MONEY. THIS MAN OWES YOU $1000 AND YOU GET TO DESTROY HIS MOST FAVORITE POSSESSION.” This seemed more than reasonable to me, and I thought about getting out of bed and quietly drafting a bill at my desk for the piss criminal, then crumpling it into a ball and launching it at his face to wake him up.
My sister Amanda texted, “You got peed on. The least I can do is buy you an ice cream cone.”
After rousing from bed, the White Stag and I walked across the street to get coffee, which he insisted on he paying for. We collected our drinks, acting jovial and making jokes together. He went home, and neither of us mentioned The Incident, or even remotely alluded to it ever again. We were going to pretend it didn’t happen, and I was fine with that.
Instead, I would talk about it to every single other person I knew, as well as those I didn’t.
That evening, Amanda came over so we could get ice cream, have dinner, and watch GLOW together, in that order. We were adults, and could have ice cream whenever the fuck we wanted.
“You know,” she said, putting her keys down on the kitchen island, “Mom says you should take your Hogwarts house out of your dating profiles.”
“What? Why?” Being the only unmarried or unattached one of her four daughters, as well as the firstborn, our mother had a deep investment in my romantic life. I had once shared my Tinder profile with her several months earlier when she felt that her advice could serve my dating life better than it was faring. This was a terrible mistake on my part, because every month or so, she would attempt to organize its reconstruction via one of my three sisters relaying her instructions to me.
“She thinks that if you have Harry Potter references in your profile, you won’t find a husband.”
I sighed. So far, she wasn’t exactly wrong. I was as close to being married now as I was to actually being accepted into Hogwarts, though one of these options I would have significantly preferred more than the other.
Amanda and I went to Ruby Jewel, a local ice cream spot which curated amazing handmade ice cream sandwiches. I ordered a cookies and cream chocolate-dipped sandwich, a thing was so messy that they had to put it in a bowl to serve it to me. Amanda and I walked back to my car, licking at our treats as we recapped the pee incident with incredulity.
As we opened the doors to get into my car, I said, “You absolutely cannot tell our mother this. I will never hear the end of it. Never. She will never let me forget it.”
Amanda was silent, staring straight ahead now in the car.
It was then that I realized that not only had she already told our mother, but that telling our mother was more than likely the first thing she had raced to do once she received my texts revealing what had happened to me. She probably had a dozen or more typos because of how quickly she was trying to transmit the message in a desperate attempt to dunk on her eldest sister as fast as possible.
“You bitch! You didn’t!” I screeched at her. Amanda started cackling, then cleared her throat and covered her mouth to appear serious. “Well, what did she say?” I pressed. I expected to hear about their raucous howling together on the phone as they shared a moment in which I, the most important person in either of their lives, was pissed on by a man I brought home, resulting in yet another romantic failure.
Which was why I was surprised when, through stifled laughter, Amanda responded, “She got quiet.”
My eyebrows raised, and I took another bite of my ice cream sandwich as the car idled.
“And she said-,” Amanda continued, shaking with laughter now, “-that you need to take your Harry Potter house out of your Tinder dating profile in order to stop attracting undesirable men.”
“Hang on, wait, wait,” I said, my eyes wide with disbelief as I externally processed what I was hearing, “Okay, let me get this straight. You told our mother that I was peed on by a man in my own bed.”
I paused. Amanda nodded, slurping more ice cream beside me.
“And her immediate reaction — the first thing to come to her mind-,” I said, between gasps of shrieking laughter now, “-was that — her firstborn daughter,” I wheezed, “- needed to take — her Harry Potter house — out of her dating profile.”
Tears were streaming down both of our eyes now. My ice cream was melting into soup as the sandwich hovered over the bowl, with long strands of sweet cream racing down my arm as I held it, unable to lift it into my mouth. Amanda and I were doubled over, laughing so hard in that no sounds could be heard outside of our gasps for air, like we were fish sucking for water to live. Because our mother correlating my mention of being a Slytherin in my dating profile and getting peed on without consent was a perfectly reasonable conclusion to have arrived at. This made the most amount of sense to her, and was the logical answer to why her daughter kept finding herself in the company of undesirable suitors, unable to find happiness or be wed.
Because of my reckless acknowledgement of my Harry Potter house.
Amanda and I drove back to my apartment, still laughing about the absurdity of it. On the way back, we talked about preparing dinner and I chatted up how great GLOW was, and how much I thought she was going to love it. We arrived back, and I quietly slipped into the bathroom with a new pair of leggings to put on before washing the ice cream off my hands.
This was because of the realization of our mother’s concern about Harry Potter houses, and the subsequent shrieking, gaping laughter with my sister that followed after this revelation as we processed it, I had just barely, only ever so slightly, peed my own pants.