Jessai Flores
After a little more than three semesters at Yale, I’ve finally finished my first bottle of shampoo. The end came suddenly, unexpectedly and at first devoid of emotion. After I scraped the bottom clean and applied the immigrant mother tactic –– pouring in some water to milk every last remnant –– the bottle finally felt satisfyingly weightless. I mindlessly threw it in the trash can on my way out of the bathroom.
But the next day, as I saw its fallen body in the company of my floormates’ takeout and banana peels, I suddenly became extremely sentimental, if not saddened by my own nonchalance. As someone who has long found allyship with inanimate objects, I’m shocked at my lack of remorse towards such a sacrosanct symbol being gone.
Moreover, this shampoo bottle has seen me grow and transform throughout my two years at Yale. It watched me sob beneath the white noise of water droplets hitting the floor, listened to me recite formulas the night before exams and cringed as I hummed off-key in the shower. It also served as a testament to my transformation: once used sporadically when I could muster time for basic hygiene, then becoming a stable friend I united with at the same time each day. But now, my most compatible, loyal ally was seeping in an unfinished takeout bowl, and I feel deeply compelled to commemorate the journey we’ve ridden together.
My shampoo was one of those ginormous family-size bottles that could sustain an entire apartment shared by Rubeus Hagrid, Rapunzel, Jared Leto post-spring 2012 and Taylor Lautner in the first two films of the Twilight franchise. I bought it hastily off the sale rack at Costco days before leaving for college; toiletries were of the least concern to me, so I prioritized volume and affordability. It came from an unheard-of brand that could pass as a hair salon in Spongebob Squarepants’ Bikini Bottom: “Phytofusion by Headwear.” The package design definitely appropriated a Windows 2008 desktop background, but who cared. I had already developed the mindset of a broke college student. Plus, the shampoo was laced with “PowerBend Technology” that supposedly helps strengthen bonds in your hair –– as if I could foresee stress-induced alopecia before I even stepped onto campus.
While packing, I shoved it into a cheap three-tier plastic drawer along with some other toiletries, which my mom and I Tetris-ed into the trunk of the SUV. The bottle rolled side to side annoyingly as we lurched through the I-95 traffic, but I remained mostly unbothered. It became background noise to the more blaring first-year anxieties.
It accompanied me during my first shower, a rite of passage for every college freshman. As my parents drove back down I-95, teary-eyed — and undeniably so — I put on my new Martha Stewart bathrobe and toted my cutsey shower caddy to the bathroom like one of those “solo life” vloggers. However, unlike the vloggers’ garage-sized showers, my faucet-as-a-shower-head on Old Campus released water slower than I could recall calculus, and the temperature failed to respond to any rotations of the spigot. I stood under the cold, low-pressure stream of water, contending that this would be my future.
When you first open a shampoo bottle, you have to twist the cap several times before it can pop out. This cap was particularly resistant to movement, as my wet fingers struggled to grip on. But after persistent efforts, its head suddenly emerged like a bird using its beak to break out of its shell, exploring the world for the first time. I didn’t know exactly where to keep it except on the floor close to the shower door, protected from the areas that pathogens and mold call home. With one pump, out came a generous stream of the luscious, creamy-white solution, emitting chemical floral aromas that would become my signature scent for the coming years.
It adjusted to Yale alongside me. It patiently waited as I backpacked through the forest for four days. It stuck around as I repeatedly delayed my personal hygiene to get in an extra chapter or paragraph of an essay. It tolerated the L-Dub floors caked with layers of ancestral grime, developing rings of dirt on the bottom rim. The shampoo sat idly in my garage for the summer, and then moved back to Berkeley, where it was promoted, for the last months, to a small shower ledge.
I consider the end of its life a victory of some sorts. I have managed to stay alive at Yale for about two years –– long enough to finish a 20 oz. family-size shampoo bottle –– with enough energy to pass my classes, take my showers, see my friends and get by. That itself is a tireless feat.
As I opened the cap to a new shampoo bottle last week, I didn’t wonder what my old bottle would think. Not a thought of sentimentality arose, or recognition that this represented a mark of a new era. It was just a bottle of shampoo. I’ve changed.