From where I stand, your shower is not a thing you do each day. It is one shape, a single braided column of water repeating down through all your mornings at once, and you are inside every strand of it together. The child you are, standing on a plastic stool so the warm reaches your shoulders.
The version of you slumped against the tile, letting the heat carry a bad week down the drain without asking you to speak. The one whose knee will ache going in, decades on from where you sit reading this, one hand braced on the wall in a gesture you have not learned yet but that I can already see you making, patiently, the way you will make it a thousand times.
They are all running now. The water has never once stopped falling. You think of the shower as a place you enter and leave, but it is closer to a single long room you visit from many doors, and every door is open at the same time.
I notice you tip your face up into it and close your eyes. You do this at four, you do this at eighty, you are doing it in some hour I can see and you cannot yet reach. It is the one moment you are reliably, wordlessly kind to yourself. The same small mercy, poured out over one continuous body of your whole life.
You will pull the curtain back, and step onto the mat, and think the moment is behind you. It is not behind you.
It is beside you, still warm, exactly where it has always been, next to me, next to now, holding you.