Showering with God

You’re showering with God tonight. He can feel how sore your thighs are from that walk you took earlier today. He rubs his hands over your ass, feels the smoothness of your skin. The hot water is perfect and God appreciates the heat. Then in the smallest voice he can muster, he whispers, shave. Shave he says, down there, prune, make sweet, make nice, reminding you that your husband is leaving town for four days in the morning.

True, you don’t usually make love after you teach, late on a Thursday night, but standing in the shower with God, you suddenly realize, you remember, as if coming to, that the man lying in bed upstairs is the man you’re married to.

You’d been saving the nice, soft body scrub, the expensive stuff that melts your skin, melts your ass and your arms and your breasts, saving it for the next time you will see your lover because you like to feel extra sexy around him.

But standing in the shower with God you remember, like popping out of a dream, who you are married to, who you actually live with, the man you bed down with every night.

And so with the hot water coming down on you, you let go of the things that bother you; his stubby beard, his too-short hair cut, his irregular breath, the slow way he likes to make love and stare into your eyes. The way he is always trying to find God through sex and through you and how exhausting that is, like he’s not really seeing you, but seeing past you and trying to get something, something from you, something you don’t have to give and something that over the years, you have found yourself more and more reluctant to even offer, even if you had it to give. But tonight you let all of this go because you’re showering with god.

And you realize that when all is said and done, the man upstairs, that’s the man who you need to mean to love. And while it’s not new; the rush and the feel and the excitement isn’t there; you don’t do it on the couch or on the kitchen counter where you’ve been doing it with your lover. It doesn’t start with a kiss, the pushing of tongues. The battle of flesh.

The site of your husband doesn’t make you want more and you don’t count the hours before you’ll see him next, but then it’s not fair to compare when you’ve been with someone for 17 years. You can’t do that, he’s not about that. He’s about loving you just the way you are and that’s not such a small thing, is it? He told you as much tonight. Told you that he’d die for you, told you this on his knees, came to you in your office and got down on his knees in front of you. And god saw this too and he asks you to respect this, to see what you have; a good man, a fine man, a man on his knees.