Waitress' Diary 27 - Smell of bleach (2010/10/01)

As I'm doing my usual preparation for the bar before the sky gets dark, cleaning and mopping. Add some bleach in the water since there are some unwelcome little creatures sneaking around in the bar which I'd like to determine.


After an hour of hard working, this place is full of the smell of bleach, colleague warns me that it might do harm to my health. However, I'm a bit shameful to admit that actually I quite enjoy this smell.

The first idea comes to my mind of this bleach smell is from my childhood memory. Dad sometimes took me and my sister for a swim in the pool, cheap public pool where you can always suspect some stupid kid could possibly pee in the water, or people just spit now and then. That pool is always with a strong smell which I didn't realise what it is until dad told me it's bleach. For me it kinda represents a sense of being spoiled in the water, even though I have never learned how to float freely.

Moreover, a memory of happiness, that dad took us to the pool, playing in the water, and always smuggling some dirty street vendor food on the way home which might not seem to be appropriate on the dining table to mom.

After my childhood, I seldom go to the pool, but of course grab every chance to take a deep breath whenever I pass by a big pool, or any place emerging a great deal of bleach smell. Whilst friends might frown, my little ceremony of worshiping childhood still goes on.

Maybe couple years ago and one hot summer day in south, my ex just moved into a new flat. Although he claimed that he already cleaned the flat before moving in, but I of course sensed that it is a joke. So I proposed to do some cleaning while he went to work that I would mop the flour inch by inch with bleach, then he can come home and feel totally refreshing. He looked at me with a slight doubt, that does a fragile city girl really know how to clean? Do we really need to use bleach? This place is not that dirty.

I simply replied "The smell of bleach feels so nice!" He gave me a weird look without argument, since he knows it's gonna be me to clean.

After 6 hours work for both sides, he came home. I was sweating like hell yet indulging myself in this beautiful smell. He came home with surprise, and suddenly realized that "yes bleach does smell so nice!" He said with a smile.

It's like a magic, we enjoyed the atmosphere of feeling new and refreshing at that certain moment in that old flat which he just moved in.

It was the moment when we were totally happy, that we thought things would just work out as the way we expected. Even there already seemed to be so many problems between us, yet we were too happy to actually see the coming punch.

A bit cliché, this love story didn't go on well, pretty much like all the other love stories going on in this world, always high and low, just we didn't make it to get through the low.

2 years after, today when I'm cleaning the bar, I thought of that day when he came home with that splendid smile and gave me a big hug just because he felt as happy as me about that bleach smell. That image is still remaining vivid, yet we already passed by each other and no longer on the same track.

For the past 2 years in my life, so many things happened in an unexpected way, I have always been in a hurry that I couldn’t really lay my hands on any certain issue to solve any problem one at a time, and sometimes I do feel regret.

Yet I finally feel released one day when I was on scooter with my sister when we were on the way to meet my dad for our usual weekend family dinner. “As long as you are sure you are happy at that moment, then that moment is for real.”

There is always too little time for too many things to do; we can only decide the priority. Even we find the priority needs to be modified afterwards; it doesn’t mean it was wrong at the first place.

Just things would change, and so would people. But that moment really exists, and the memory lasts, that we both looked refreshingly happy and fabulous.