The Girl in the Bath

The Girl in the Bath

Written by Juliette L.

Her gaze rose to the cracking ceiling through her snow-white lashes, her lilac eyes glinting slightly in the dim light of the single, aged bulb hanging from the centre of the ceiling. Her pale fingers strummed the small guitar gently, playing to the rhythm of the dripping bath tap as she sang softly. Her imagination filled in the missing instruments, the beating drums and smooth keyboard, letting the memory of the people behind them wash over her for a few seconds as she sighed deeply. The roaring crowds, singing along completely off-key as they waved their arms to the rhythm... Her friends grinning at her as she shot them a smile...

But she couldn’t let herself think about that for too long, she would never be able to go back to that, and she would never be able to see them again... Instead, she spent her days sitting in an old bathtub, its glossy mint paint peeling away as if to escape her morose tunes. She’d been doing this for so long, to the point that the tips of her fingers had hardened so much that she couldn’t even feel the strings of the guitar as she played the songs they had written in the small caravan they used to own. They would take it everywhere, they lived on the road, they loved the feeling of never knowing where they would end up next. They loved the feeling of the wind running its fingers through their hair through the open roof of the car they had found at an abandoned garage and fixed. And they loved the rush of adrenaline they felt as they threw themselves off the stage and surfed over the sea of grasping fanatic hands...

But now that was all over...

Now all that she had was her cracking guitar and her tumbledown room in an abandoned air bnb in the middle of nowhere, and that was all she would ever have. She had grown tired of that life, of the constant screaming between her and her friends, the eyes that never ceased to stare...

And so she had run.

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This creative writing piece is part of our Scholars' Showcase 2020