Initially I was evasive, but inevitably I wound up on a plane to Durham. My mom offered to buy tickets months ago, but it took two months and a stretch of long distance that would’ve lasted eons had I not acted on her generosity to finally convince me. 

Martin assuaged nearly all fears I had: he would pick me up from the airport, his roommate was fine with me invading their dorm, and Duke ended its policy of burning opinionated women at the stake back in 2014. However, he was unable to tame my deepest, truest fear. I envisioned something akin to the scene in Carrie where the girls in the locker room hurl tampons at Sissy Spacek; where they would immediately be able to recognize that I’m an intruder and judge accordingly. I was right in some regards, as the bathroom did evoke the starkly beautiful cinematography of a dePalma film.  

Initially I was furious at Martin for showing me the restroom,because the door was so heavy I thought he was taking me into a closet as a stupid bit of his. Luckily for him, it seems that the door is just like that; after further inspection my guess is that there is a tremendous amount of sand inside the wood paneling that gives the door its two-ton weight. It didn’t help that the door handle was incredibly flimsy, and was widthwise probably about the size of my thumb.  To get in, I would have to firmly plant my feet shoulder-width apart and use my entire upper body to force the door open. In a miraculous twist of fate, nobody was ever around the hallways enough to witness this mildly embarrassing ordeal. Don’t be fooled, though, this is not an obstacle; it is a litmus test so that only the most worthy, hard-working dorm residents are able to make it out of Alspaugh Hall and up to the pearly gates.

The first thing you notice when you walk into this particular bathroom is just how damn bright it is. You have to blink a couple times to let your eyes adjust to the stark white walls and the angelic, yellowish radiation of the light panels as they shine down on you. 

The bathroom showed warning signs of dirtiness; the kind of cursory and slightly surface level clean that lets you feel like you aren’t swimming in black mold, but still keeps you perpetually on your toes out of fear of being the singular person that tips the scales towards complete hygienic anarchy. Just looking at the corners of the shower, you could see the valiant fight the heroic janitors were facing against an inevitable grime infestation.

Anyone entering is immediately soothed by the steady flow of a distant showerhead, like the calming sound of rain outside your window on a stormy night. It is a gentle reminder that you are not the only person around, a very delicate way of telling you not to hum ‘Mr. Boombastic’ while washing your hair. I was always afraid of disturbing this heavenly sound by turning on the shower in my cubicle, but I soon found that all this does is obscure the old noise, making both showerees oblivious to anyone’s existence but their own. It was then, as I closed the slightly sticky PVC-esque curtain that I felt alone in the truest sense of the word. Not necessarily in a melancholic sort of way; more like the quiet bliss that accompanies the realization that you belong enough that nobody questions your presence. 

Several mishaps occurred during my first shower at Duke that in any other setting would have sent me spiraling, however, I was so at peace with myself that it didn’t bother me one bit when I forgot my towel. I could not figure out how to get the nozzle to stand on its own, so I had to hold it up manually, which meant shampooing became a one-handed task. This was a little concerning, as it was probably host to bacteria containing STDs previously unheard of to modern society, but I trudged onward. 

What’s probably the most shocking and beautiful about this particular bathroom is that nobody really cared about you being there. This is a wonderful change of pace from my high school, where the simple act of walking into the restroom feels as if you are entering a war zone. You have to time your trip to pee perfectly, otherwise you are met with vicious glares from the gaggle of girls vaping in the corner. They are quite literally always in the bathroom, an inescapable reminder of the fact that no matter how hard I try, it’s impossible to be left alone when you attend a public school.  Even if you do manage to time it so that nobody is around to bother you or loudly gossip while you wash your hands, the cluttered and cramped feel of KHS’s facilities make me feel like I’m being smothered. The scent of the Vape Girls’ weed pens mixes with the ever-present Mushroom Smell to create a noxious, thick scent that lingers longer than Herpes, and the piss-colored yellow of the tile walls slowly asphyxiate me as I try to do my business. 

But not the Alspaugh girls’ bathroom – no, in there it is corporate, it is chic, it is the American Dream. 

 I realize that my bright-eyed naiveté is warping my vision, and that college will not be this peaceful. The initial glory of the College Bathroom will likely wear off, I’m sure of it. Certainly once I know all of my peers, it will not be very fun to share a bathroom with them. Soon, the anonymous shower guest is the girl down the hall that I hate because she chews really loudly during lectures. Soon, I have seen the dirt on the floor of the shower day after day, and when it is clean I will come to the understanding that this is fleeting. Soon, I will recognize that the dirt is caught in a relentless cycle of death and rebirth until somebody becomes fed up and renovates the facility. I hope, though, that this won’t matter to me, and I’ll be content enough with my life that these minor hiccups are of no consequence.

My experiences in The Bathroom are microcosm of why I loved visiting Duke so much: for the first time in ages I had the liberating feeling of not being Known, of being a temporary part of an ecosystem where my sole purpose is to just exist, to not make any impact or imprint but to be, even if just for a moment. There’s irony in this, that even though I was surrounded by preppy do-gooders with laserlike focus on the future, who will likely spend their four years scrambling to stick out in a school full of former valedictorians, I felt the least amount of pressure I ever have in my entire life. 

What I thought as I meditatively stared into the eyes of the Duke Women’s Center flyer is that when it comes down to it, no matter how much we are able to scrape by in the inevitable rat race of elitist institutions and in the often-false hope of upward mobility, at the end of the day we are all just patrons of the bathroom.