I am legally blind.

Yep. Without my glasses or contacts I can’t see the numbers on a clock three feet away. I can’t see leaves on a tree. If a bald man other than Himself tried to cop a feel he’d probably get much further than appropriate before I commenced the requisite face-slapping.

So for the most part I don’t go more than a few steps from my bed without my glasses on, and my contact lenses are in as soon as I’m done toweling off.

But there is this brief no-man’s land of blindness – when I’m in the shower.

This creates a problem. Of a sort. It depends on how you look at it, I guess.

I can’t see when the shower is dirty.

And I don’t mean that I’m oblivious to a ring of soap scum. Although I would be.

I mean that things can grow in the shower that are the primordial versions of the next antibiotic resistant super-bug and I will be happily singing Mariah Carey tunes in utter obliviousness.

The fact that our shower is a really depressing mauve tile with dark grout makes the problem worse. If the tile were white, I would bet that at a certain point I would realize that there wasn’t meant to be a pattern before it reached out and grabbed me. But no such luck.

I have a loofah.

I bought the loofah because I was told that I needed to exfoliate before getting my spray tan in order to extend the life of the tan. (This was before Hawaii in the summer.) If this is true, then without the loofahing I would have been back to my pasty, white self before I even got in the car. I think the tan lasted about eleven glorious minutes.

So anyway. There’s a loofah. It’s been hanging innocently in the shower since the end of the summer.

And what I let happen to that poor loofah is just criminal. Wrong in deep, amoral ways.

Imagine, being an innocent piece of…of…sea sponge? Ocean whole grain? Anemone fiber?  What the hell is a loofah made out of? Starfish membrane??

Anyway…you’re an innocent piece of sea roughage and you’re just chilin’ in the personal beauty section at Target with the scrubby mitts and the lavender scented bath beads. And some pale, forty-something redhead snatches you off the shelf and purchases you along with a set of marked down storage bins and a copper throw pillow that matches nothing in the history of everything.

You perform your job one time…one time!…and then you hang on a hook in a shower.

For months.

And then the real horror starts. You see the mold creeping along the caulk. The mildew sneaks in in the night and hides behind the almost-empty-but-never-thrown-away bottle of conditioner that caused horrible waxy buildup.

You hope to be used. To be moved. To be rinsed out with hot water.

But no.

I can’t even tell the rest. It’s too wretched.

But this weekend, when I got chilly enough to want a shower in the middle of the day – with my contact lenses in – I saw it. I saw it all.

And it put Wes Craven to shame.

That poor loofah was a splotched, diseased mess. It was beyond life support. It was well on its way to Zombie-hood. It was only a few days away from needing an exorcism. A beheading. A staking? What is the preferred method for killing undead exfoliating tools? I’m unclear.

When I got out of the shower, I said a small prayer and disposed of the loofah. I commit its stiff body unto the earth in the trash can. Ashes to ashes, banana peel to banana peel and all that.

As for the rest of the shower, well, I know how to take care of that.

Never shower with my bloody contact lenses in again. That’s how.