I find peeing with the door open way more intimate than sex. To embrace someone’s body shedding waste as a cyclical celebration and window into their wellbeing through color (orange?!) or volume (drink this.) speaks to caring and comfortability more complex than pleasure and not limited to romantic attraction.

Which is to say, I pee in front of all the people I truly love.

Doubtlessly, consent is essential to peeing around others–a fact I gleaned the moment I
learned most people’s families are far less comfortable with urination than mine, when my sister called me after spending time in a hotel with her now husband early in their relationship.

“Do you remember anyone ever closing the door to pee in our house?” And I did not. We
simmered–and peed–in free implied consent our whole childhood. It weirds our partners out.

“Are you actually talking to me while you pee right now?” He was an Australian actor I
met working on a farm in Latin America and with whom I traveled some time and had hooked up with frequently before we found ourselves in privacy relative enough to share our own bathroom. Which meant peeing with the door open, obviously. And I was. Talking to him, that is.

Because throughout my childhood, members of my immediate family unit understood
that anyone could walk away from a bathroom in use, but to stay within earshot meant
consenting to continue any conversation in progress. Which I mostly remember during movies. We’d pause and take turns peeing and comment on the film. “Do you still need to go? Should I flush yet?” Number one only–no one wants to listen to someone taking a dump.

When The Australian showed up unannounced in Colorado in a sheepskin duster six
months after we’d last spoken with a bottle of wine and a new nose ring, I closed the door to pee. They say flipping a coin always reveals the answer to a binary conundrum; if the flip decides an outcome you feel content with, wonderful. If you feel disappointed–well that’s just a different way of arriving at the same decision. Heads, tails. Open, close. There’s a lot to be said for the subconscious.

So I knew I had met my best friend when a professor organizing a fellowship trip
matched us as roommates, and–though she closed the door–she talked to me while she peed. We spent the next three weeks measuring how much electrolyte powder to add to our water bottles based on the shade of the mixed urine in our hotel bathroom. We stopped closing the door after four days.

Contributor Bio:

Kira Córdova is an on-and-off tall ship sailor and emerging writer working on an MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University. Their poetry has appeared in Troublemaker Firestarter Magazine, and they have an essay in the most recent issue of Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social.