The mumbling woman spoke to me in cryptic, almost neurologically damaged and nearly primitive tongue. I thought, "Well, maybe I'm too stoned." Maybe it was my self - induced, temporary dysfunction. No, it wasn't. Another woman walked into the dark, mauve ladies room. The mumbling woman continued to banter, directing her gibberish to the new member of the bathroom encountering. Before my stall entry, the new member was walking in. She expelled a rude shrug while walking past me and darted her black eyeliner eyes from her to me and to the left and then to the right. Not really looking at anything at all - on the left or the right. Nervously and seemingly annoyed, she briskly rubbed her hands underneath the running faucet and then frantically wiped her hands on the brown, crunchy paper towel.

She was either sexually unsatisfied or she felt nervous having any short-term girl talk that contained the slightest bit of oddity. She seemed the sort that could only have trivial, superficial conversation or else it would make her nervous; while being in a public bathroom, a bathroom in a bar, a club, with bands and hip, supposedly cool people. Not that one reveals his or her soul to strangers that pass in public restrooms. Simply, that there is a distinction between an empty soul and a full one. Sometimes, it's only in a gesture or a few stagnant words. "They" say that the eyes are the projectors of the soul. This was proven so with this dull soul. She was out of place and feeling the likeness to it. With a quick turn, she left swiftly and hurriedly. I then realized that she hadn't even urinated. Although, from the curious look she gave to me then to the stall where the woman was blabbering nonsensical rhetoric, I felt approval that I was correct in my audible judgment; that, indeed, the mumbling woman was not speaking a language to her or to me. As I waited for one of the two stalls to become vacant, a short, stout woman stumbled into the ladies room. She was clad in a baggy, hot-pink sweatshirt that was silk-screened with haughty, black, abstract designs and tight jeans that seemed to squeeze her female haunch and embrace her centerpiece. She blatantly writhed with displeasure, then broke into a persuasive oral dissertation on how badly she had to urinate. "Oh man, I could pee a whole bunch of buckets," she blurted while tightening and bending her knees in contorted movements.

Her hair was black. She looked Native American or Mexican. Her olive-brown skin was prematurely worn and wrinkled. She had the homogeneous look of a tattered and broken woman. Her downcast gestures, veiled by a facade of light heartedness. It seemed that the mumbling woman and the random woman in the other stall were taking a long time. Then, the random woman walked out and left leaving a trail of strong, popular smelling perfume.

Unbuttoning my pants and trying to listen to the woman in the next stall to see if I could make out some words, I began to giggle because I thought of her language being dubbed in with the muffled sound of the band and then recorded and sold to some big label. Thoughts that occur while urinating are often emphatic and as cathartic as the act itself. Like: pissing away money is not unlike pissing away thoughts. The latter of the two is almost a crime. It was as if all of the graffiti that was markered on dark mauve paint was transmitting a mass quantity of female hormone ions that were only bouncing around within the walls of the restroom. As if, when I walked out I would export these ions to the crowd.

The soap container plopped out a small pile of thick, pink powder. Pink soap. It was grainy and weak -- barely cleaning the bar scum from my hands. I looked up to the mirror to look at myself to remind myself that my body was still there; that my mind was connected with the person who is in my body and to question the psychological dichotomy between the two. Also, to check in with vanity. A smack of a metal door against a metal wall. In the glass and behind my reflection -- a bright pink flash displayed in the mirror and then the body was gone.

Standing there in front of the smudged mirror, I thought. I thought about Palenque, Mexico; swinging and swinging on a hammock in the jungle. I thought about the way the moistened air, the fervency of being out of a familiar element, and of the peace that has yet to be replaced by any other moment in time like that time. Then, I shook my head like a cartoon animal and brought myself back -- to the ladies' room. I was alone.

Its mauve walls and the overall ambiance: almost unbearable and almost nice, faintly warm sentient with a sterile smell. The slightest bit of a flowery scent wafted up my nose as I walked out the door. The pink soap residue that was on my hand that pushed back my hair was an insidious scent that stayed with me for the remainder of the evening. It reminded me of all of those hundreds of thousands of public restrooms I've been in. Walking towards the table around stray, lonely people bobbing their heads to an experimental jazz beat. Looking pretty neat. Looking pretty cool. I thought, as if they weren't there, about the fluorescent, lime-green tree frog with suction cups on the tips of its fingers. It clung to a palm tree that was imprisoned around the concrete of a poolside at the Holiday Inn at Fort Worth, Texas. That's were the frog was, and that's were I was while traveling to a family reunion somewhere in Texas with my mother who was going through menopause while I was going through puberty. The Holiday Inn. The pink soap. The frog. The pink soap. The ladies room. I floated back to my seat, sat and chat relentlessly about how the band had a similar endless, rambling sound as the Grateful Dead.

The same, le mème, the likeness of and so on. It was a cognate theme of many other past times spent in a club, listening to a band, drinking alcohol, while pondering the universe and my past, present and future. To whatever it was that kept my mind on the restroom, I contained it with the utmost pious regard. Not unlike a religious experience or an outer body experience. In its simplicity that I found a deeper meaning. What exactly, I am unsure. Flaccid boredom and anxiety radiated from many of the patrons. The exception of that radiation was the warmth of the hand that softly landed on my thigh when I sat down. The smile from a soft, warm and delicious body of man. Body of Christ. The body onto which I impale myself. A real, live, breathing, thinking, feeling, wanting, yearning, hurting, churning body of life.

At that moment, were alone. I looked at him and he looked at me. We smiled and that was it. Turning in my seat and looking around with the curiosity of any household animal, I scanned the room around me. Dancing heads, swaying torsos from left to right, forward and backward in inharmonious union; in disenchanted, zombie- like gestures that mocked what has already been seen, done, heard and lived in a minutely different way. Yet, they were having fun. I was having fun. However, it wasn't the time or place that felt awkward, it was the residivousness of the act of socializing without being sociable. Only talking to him and friends, only thinking of the Strings and Mirrors theory; only resting my chin on my bent wrist and open palm.

It was much like dreaming within a dream - dreaming that you're dreaming. Edgar Allen Poe once said, "All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream." If only it was a dream I would have been lucid dreaming and entered the dream to control it. Like, jumping on the stage and madly kissing the guitar player and grabbing his crotch, then jumping off the stage roaring with maniacal laughter, then run out the door. Ah, but silly fantasies are only fiction and I am only one small, carbon-based life form on a human-infested planet.

His hands rubbed my thigh and slid upward to the center of my being. Again, we looked at each other and smiled. A twinge of arousement shot inside me and I squirmed a bit. He reeked with a supernal affection that was so undefined, so wanting and almost child-like, that I forgot where I was for a sweet second. Undefined. that's what kept me, and keeps me, in a pathetic suspense. I wondered why this happens to people. I wondered why it was happening to me. Why is the nature of love, lust, and infatuation; or whatever the names are for it and their varying degrees; to wonder what will happen to it? Why can't we follow the clichés: "Take a day at a time", " Live for the moment."? Our perpetual curiosity and our search for some ambiguous unity within and without are the facets of our essence that make us fall and get up again in ad infinitum.

The ladies room door swung open and that dull, mauve-tinted light oozed onto that small area of the club; it released the broken woman with the dark olive skin and tacky, pink shirt. She stumbled awkwardly out of it's door and looked over at the band and screamed, "Whooooh - Yeah!" Her children, that she more than likely had, were probably being watched by a family member. It was her haunch that made me think that she had given birth more than once. It was her demeanor that saddened me. It was like the mauve walls were calling me to urinate within their cell. As if, the beer wasn't the cause of my return to the lavatory. A slow saunter towards it's door; men gawking, cigarette smoke wafting; and I pushed open the wooden door. I re-entered the same stall to the right.

After shutting the door and pulling down my jeans, I squatted without sitting on the toilet. There was a collection of " Beware of men" graffiti(s) adorning the inside of the stall. Dedications to a murdered female singer were the most prevalent. Notes on rape and safety, messages about men to avoid and typical additions of names, like Sasha + John, were all written in black marker and all lacked in original thought. While pulling up my pants, I heard the swing of the door coincide with the rise in the volume of the band. Upon exiting, I brushed arms with the mumbling woman who was still in there. She uttered some unintelligible sounds, gave a child-like giggle, and then went into the same stall she was in the last time. Strange, how timely my bladder was with hers and only following the broken woman's by a few minutes.

I returned to my seat, next to his inviting self. Not alone, but feeling that way. Ephemeral love and friendship: I've grown accustomed to it. Time slips and slides with all that it entails speeding along side of it. Knowing people's darkest secrets then never seeing them again.

Geographical shifts, death, separation and overall life changes make us separate from one another; rarely coming back to the same state.

I wondered if my observational relationship with the women in the ladies room would mean as much to me as my irrevocable friend that I met and hung out with at the shore. She was smart, we shared the same interest in writing and she liked to write stories. We wrote to each other for a while after that summer. After one summer, 20 years ago, I never saw Diana Sun again but I have thought of her from time to time as only a memory. As if, she no longer exists since she isn't in my life. As if, when you leave a town where you are passing through that it has disappeared and there are no lives living, no dogs barking, no lights turning. Looking at the people I was with, I wondered what they'd be like in ten years. I wondered what I'd be like. Where would we be at that exact moment ten years later? I looked at each of them individually and saw it. Now, years later, I still wonder. I saw my one friend reading the newspaper in front of the television, and the other pushing a car with a woman in it out of a ditch somewhere down south. I felt sad for a moment that human life is so short and what fills it is ultimately temporary. Two weeks or seventy years: temporal. So many restrooms in so many places with so many different people saying different things. In the door and out again and so on. A continuum of circumstances and wondering.

Kathryn Lewis moved from Philadelphia to Seattle seven years ago and is presently getting tired of the rain. She has been published in The Welcomat, The San Diego Reader, Art Matters, and Hunger Magazine. She was accepted to the Ploughshares International Fiction Writers Seminar in the Netherlands, but could not afford to go. She has a small business of her own so she doesn’t have to deal with Corporate land. Her education was at York College, Temple University, through traveling and in the observation of and the participation in life itself.