Ellie's Brain

At my old public pool, it was well known amongst me and my friends that if one of us had to pee, we would be doing so on the big blue slide. For some reason, it seemed far more sanitary to slide down alongside our piss rather than let it out in the middle of a giant pool swarming with various other excrements, Band-Aids, and bacteria. Somehow, we were able to rationalize that the rushing water in the slide purified the act. 

As I grew a bit older, I stopped peeing in public pools; mostly because I stopped going to them. I had graduated to other bodies of water such as rivers, lakes, oceans, and ponds. I found it far more satisfying and (at least in my head) sanitary to piss in these spaces instead. This was up until the day that my friend Megan and I went to a spa. 

It was my very first spa experience, and I had a grand time. We did the “thermal circuit” package, and transitioned between a sauna, ice bath, hot tub, steam room, and relaxation beds. Naturally, the constant transitions between hot and cold left me parched, and the accidental nap I took on the relaxation beds created a desertscape in my mouth. Luckily for us, there was a small station with jugs of ice-cold water with some sort of vegetable floating inside, and I frequented it. 

Even in normal cases I have issues with controlling my small bladder, so it came as no surprise here that I was overcome with the urge to pee every 30 minutes. The locker room and bathroom were both upstairs, which forced me to make the laborious trek upstairs every so often in my bathrobe. 

At some point the pacing of my own thermal circuit once again coincided with Megan’s, and I announced that I needed to pee, already slipping on my robe in preparation for the journey upstairs. 

She looked at me in a  surprised way. 

“Oh, I’ve just been going in the water,” she said, nonchalantly. 

My mouth dropped open. “What?! You have? Where?!”

She grinned a little. “The ice bath area. It honestly didn’t even occur to me to go to the bathroom.”

My eyes bugged out of their sockets. 

“The ice bath?! That’s the very last place I would’ve considered peeing in. Isn’t that supposed to be, like, the cleanest place? Why not the hot tub?!” 

She shrugged, and simply said, “It just made the most sense to do it there.”

We were both, in fact, at this moment, sitting on a bench directly across from the ice bath. We turned our heads to observe it. The blue light shining inside the water made it seem extra pure (misleadingly, I now realized), and there was a small cascading waterfall of fresh, cold water above it. 

I hesitated only a moment before asking, “…should I pee in there?”

“Yeah, why not.” 

I immediately leapt to my feet and moved to the bath, suddenly giddy with excitement and anticipation. I mean, there’s really no thrill quite like peeing somewhere you’re not supposed to.

I lowered myself into the icy water, fought the initial wall—the one where you know you need to pee but suddenly can’t for a second— and then felt the warm relief around me. 

Something about the moving water above me purified the act.