By Anna Loritz

“Austin, do you need anything?” I asked through the bathroom door. “Glass of water? A pillow?”

His response was a retching sound echoing against porcelain. I pushed open the door to see my boyfriend of five months with his head hanging over the toilet. My tiny bathroom was so cramped, I couldn’t even sit on the edge of the bathtub to comfort him. I stood behind him, feeling useless.

“Do you think it’s the flu?” I asked. Do you think it’s COVID? I wanted to ask. He spat into the toilet.

“I don’t know,” he replied miserably. “I haven’t actually thrown up. I just feel like I have to.” I offered an array of solutions and comforts, reminiscent of my mother when I was sick as a child. 7-Up? Oyster crackers? Bed on the couch with a Disney movie and a little plastic trash can nearby?

“I think I’m just gonna hang out in here for a while,” he replied, folding his tall frame to fit on the bathroom floor, instructing me to close the door on my way out.

I pulled repeatedly on the crystal doorknob trying to get the ancient mechanism to latch shut. I was suddenly filled with annoyance that had little to do with the doorknobs in my century old rental. It was Saturday morning. I had a stack of student work to grade, a lesson plan to prepare, and roughly ten hours of grad school work to do before Sunday night. Tending to a sick boyfriend who may or may not have COVID was the last thing I wanted to be worried about.

I took a deep breath and walked away from the bathroom door. I reminded myself that it wasn’t Austin’s fault he was sick. We only ran necessary errands and wore masks when we did. I may have brought home a flu bug from school. If anything, I was annoyed with myself. I agreed to let Austin come halfway across the country to stay with me in Wisconsin. I wanted to stay in touch when we’d both lost our jobs at a New York nonprofit that spring, putting myself in another long distance relationship. I was the one who decided to take two online grad school classes while also teaching full time.

Austin had offered to come “help me out” after hearing me gripe on the phone week after week about how overwhelmed I was feeling.

“You know I’m a good cook. I can do your laundry and the dishes,” he had said. “Do you do toilets?” I laughed into my iPhone.

“But what about your mom?” I asked.

“She was fine before I moved in with her. She’ll be fine if I move out. Let me help you get through your semester,” he offered.

“And your job hunt?” I replied hesitantly, not sure how touchy he’d be about the subject.

“I’ve been trying for months now,” he sighed. “There’s just nothing out there that pays enough to risk bringing COVID home to my mom.” I racked my brain for other obstacles, trying to be pragmatic about the situation.

“Well I suppose I could hire you, but I should warn you, I pay zero dollars an hour.”

The conversation replayed in my head as I went to the bedroom and began stripping the sheets from the bed, another remedy my mom had employed when someone was sick. The sheets smelled stale and faintly of Austin. I pulled a clean set from the wardrobe and fluffed them over the mattress. The sound of a four-legged gallop announced the arrival of my cat.

“Yzma!” I exclaimed as she made a flying leap onto the mattress to play under the sheet. Giggling, I fluffed it again and again so she could scurry around on the mattress, frantically pawing at the corners. As kids, my siblings and I had done the exact same thing whenever my mom would make a bed. I had always wondered why my mom hadn’t been more annoyed that we were creating an obstacle for her. But the first time I’d made a bed after bringing Yzma home, I instantly understood. I took just as much joy from my kitty frolicking under the sheets as she did.

I’d accidentally adopted her from the Humane Society two months prior. After sensing I was becoming a workaholic and a grad school robot, I began looking for a healthy distraction. I’d never owned a cat before, so I went to the Humane Society and asked if I could hang out with some cats for a while to make sure I wasn’t allergic—a logical first step in considering pet ownership. While there, a three-month-old stray wiggled her way into my heart. Despite my itchy eyes and stuffy nose, I filed adoption paperwork and went back for her the next day. A minor cat allergy wasn’t going to keep me from her.

Her first night at home, she crawled into bed with me, her head on the pillow, her body under the covers, mimicking how I slept, a look of bliss on her cute little cat face. I was in love. The last time I’d felt that way was when my parents had brought my youngest sibling home from the hospital. I was eight and nestled deep in a rocking chair with my baby sister asleep in my arms, trying to memorize her pink wrinkly face before my parents made me go to school for the day.

“Can I please stay home?” I begged. The thought of leaving her, even just for the length of the school day, was almost unbearable.

As I negotiated with Yzma to get the fitted sheet onto the mattress, I was struck by the fact that I had stronger feelings for my cat than my boyfriend. That, given the choice between the two of them, I’d expel Austin from my life.

“What’s the matter with me?” I muttered as I shimmied a pillow into a pillowcase. It wasn’t the first time I’d asked myself this question. Less than a year ago, I’d moved to Montreal to be with a boyfriend. It didn’t take me long to realize that the tender feelings I had for that relationship paled in comparison to the fierce love I had for the myriad people and connections back home. That relationship felt like it was on one side of a scale, all my other loves and interests on the other. The love for my Montreal boyfriend would simply never weigh enough to keep me there.

But it wasn’t just the Montreal boyfriend. Every relationship felt like
it drained me somehow. The wannabe singer-songwriter, the guy from my hometown I met at the dentist, the kilt-wearing sailor—every relationship I’d ever been in felt like I’d been tricked into buying a Furby. The “it” toy of the late 90’s, Furbies were creepy animatronic stuffed animals. Brightly colored and vaguely owl-looking, they had sensors that could detect movement and sound and responded by “speaking furbish” and moving their batty ears and droopy eyes. The idea was to teach it English by playing with it often.

One of my younger sisters got one for her birthday. It was silly and amusing enough, but after a few days of it “talking” all hours of the day and night, it became a bane to the whole family. Unable to turn it off, my mom wrapped it in a blanket and shoved it in the back of a coat closet.

In my experience Furbies weren’t so different from romantic partners. Everything I saw on TV suggested I should have one. Everyone else seemed to have one and take joy from it. But once I had one in my life, it wasn’t long before I wanted to get rid of it. It was a distraction. It kept me from getting good sleep. I could never seem to give it the attention it deserved. And even when I made an effort, we just weren’t speaking the same language.

As I finished making the bed—managing to get the comforter to lay flat without a cat shaped bump underneath it—a thought struck me. Maybe it wasn’t the people I was dating, but the effect of the relationship itself. A relationship took a level of attentiveness that required diverting my energy from other passions: friends, family, teaching, creative writing, grad school, sailing, traveling. I looked at the closed bathroom door. Austin had done nothing wrong. It was all me.

A romantic partner was more than I could handle. My life was already so full of love and energy and projects, squeezing a boyfriend into it meant something else had to get pushed out. Like adding ice to a glass of water that was already full to the brim, some of the water was going to spill out.

I felt more supported by a web of relationships and connections rather than putting the majority of my weight on a single thread. I wasn’t ready for my life to hang from one primary relationship. Maybe I never would be. Or maybe I just needed a bigger glass. Time to grow in a way that would accommodate both the ice and the water.

Just as that thought began to settle, a second one hit me, like the tsunami after an earthquake. Maybe I was dating Furbies? And on purpose! Allowing myself to be in relationships that were overly complicated or doomed from the start, so I always had a ready excuse for a breakup—the cards were stacked against us. I made it so that when I was feeling overwhelmed, the decision about what to cut from my life was an easy one.

Maybe I needed to stop dating Furbies and find a partner who would be a good strong thread I could weave into my life. Someone who could be a part of my web of support. But was I even ready for that?

Yzma laid on the floor next to the bathroom door, reaching her paws underneath, trying to get to Austin. I had room for cat ownership love in my life, love that was uncomplicated and unconditional—so long as I fed her. But mature, romantic love?

I sighed, went back into the bedroom, and grabbed the throw blanket from off the bed. For a second I imagined wrapping Austin in it and shoving him in the closet. Yzma looked up at me with big, round, sympathetic eyes and squeaked out a meow as if to say “be nice to him.” I knocked on the bathroom door.

“Austin, how about a blanket to lay on?”

Journals, Writing as Therapy, and Self-Partnering: An Interview with Anna Loritz

Reonna Huettner: Your story, “Furby on My Bathroom Floor” is a super raw and in-depth capture of inner emotions. Was this a recent event or did a memory spark inspiration to write it?

Anna Loritz: So, “Furby on My Bathroom Floor” was for me a very therapeutic piece of writing. I did write it almost instantly after the incident happened. For me, writing has always been a therapeutic process and ever since I could write I’ve kept a journal. With this particular partner I was living with at this time, he was curious about my journal, wanted to be in my journal, and it kinda made me stop doing that for a while. I think this story was the outcome of stopping because I had all of these thoughts that were exploding out of me and it led me to my computer to start writing. 

RH: While he was in the bathroom, on the floor? 

AL: Maybe. Maybe, haha. Just kidding, not quite when he was in the bathroom throwing up, but it was maybe a couple of hours after that I sat down and started processing by writing down my thoughts and eventually that frame formed the story. 

RH: Well, I for one, loved how the story turned out. I also loved the use of the Furby! As someone who grew up playing with them, what made you pick this comparison between Furbies and the person in the story? 

AL: You know, I really don’t know how I came up with the Furby idea… I have three younger siblings and we are always reminiscing on silly things we did during our childhood. I think what probably happened was one day we were reminiscing about toys and Furby’s must have come up around the same time I was writing this story. I didn’t actually include the Furby metaphor until the later stages of finishing the piece. 

RH: When you wrote this piece, what was one main message you wanted your readers to feel and take away from it? Do you have any advice for them?

AL: There’s kind of this new terminology that came up in recent years called being self-partnered, meaning you are a whole person as you are and that you don’t need to have a partner in life to live a fulfilled one. I knew part of what I wanted to convey in the story is that I feel like a really fulfilled person and as I am watching people get married, there’s a part of me that sits and wonders why I’m not doing that and why I do not want to do that. But as I pointed out in the story, sometimes when relationships get hard I tend to bail on them even while still caring about them. 

I think over time I found that I cared more about what I was working on at the time where the relationship wasn't a personal priority and I felt bad that I was treating people like they were expendable when in reality that wasn’t my intention at all. I just had other goals that I learned were more important to me than settling down, getting married, and starting a family. I want people to know, readers to know—particularly young women—that you don’t need to build your life around another person. It all really depends on the person and what fits their life best. 

RH: What a good message! Is there anything else that I haven’t asked about that you want readers to know?

AL: One other thing that is important to me, that I kept thinking about while writing the story, was my family and the love that I have for them. It just continuously bubbled up as I was writing and I didn’t exactly know what to do with those emotions. I was getting teary thinking about the simplest memories, like when my sister was born and couldn’t bear to leave her even for a day. Those feelings of love, even if it didn’t seem like it, is what I think love is and really sprung itself into the story.