Who are these “high-functioning” people that never need to piss? Or, at the very least, don’t need to piss at least three times an hour as Aida always did. And no, she didn’t even have the “excuse” of being “of a certain age” that might make it make sense. For it’s no secret that the bladder has a tendency to “shrink” with age due to the various conditions that come with “getting up there” in years. Making it even more of a challenge than it already is to venture out into the public space. Something that Aida struggled to do in general without adding her constant and frantic search for a bathroom into the mix.

As a result, she essentially had to vet wherever she was going in order to ascertain if the location in question had bathroom accommodations that were “correct” for her. More often than not, they didn’t. This in no small part because of her persnickety requirements. For instance, specific kinds of coffee shops were “acceptable” for her to be in and risk having to use the bathroom, but definitely not ever a Starbucks or a Coffee Bean (the latter mostly because she could never forget about the case of the lawyer who planted spy cams in the bathrooms of more than one Coffee Bean location in Encino—not that she would ever be caught dead in Encino, but still). Peet’s, on the other hand, was a sanctioned chain at which she would agree to meet.

Restaurants also had similar caveats if someone wanted to arrange a rendezvous with her for breakfast, lunch or dinner. For example, Aida would concede to meeting someone at Il Fornaio but not The Cheesecake Factory. It was all a matter of her highly-refined bathroom tastes. Tastes that had been cultivated over her many years of being someone who needed to piss all the time. And yes, on the one hand, the frequency of what she called the river running through her had a lot to do with how much water and coffee she mainlined, Aida also knew that her bladder was inherently small. Some people were just built that way and she knew she was one of them. In fact, some part of her believed it might be a “genetic thing.”

After all, she was keenly aware that both her mother and grandmother had the same “predilection” for pissing all the time, rest their souls (and bladders). For they had died within three years of each other, when Aida was still a teenager. And even at that youthful age, she was incessantly asking for the hall pass (just one of many cruel inventions of the American school system). While most of Aida’s teachers didn’t think much of her taking it, she had one in particular, Mr. Milland (a math teacher, obviously), who got off on denying her genuine request to relieve herself. He learned his own lesson the hard way after Aida actually wet herself while sitting at her desk, the sound of the drip, drip, drip that spilled over onto the linoleum floor distracting everyone until they all turned to face her where she sat in the back of the room. Once that happened, Aida’s mother, who was still alive at the time, threatened the principal with a lawsuit for violating Aida’s basic rights.

Needless to say, Mr. Milland never questioned or rebuffed Aida again whenever she took the hall pass—no longer bothering to ask permission for it in the wake of this “incident.” Of course, just to spite Mr. Milland for the embarrassment he had caused her by leaving her no choice but to piss in her chair, she would take the hall pass multiple times throughout his class, even when she didn’t have to go. The disruption it caused brought her no end of joy, especially as she could feel Mr. Milland’s blood positively boiling over it and knew there was nothing he could say or do to stop her now. Aida supposed that was her first taste of real power. And maybe the fact that it was related, ultimately, to the limitations of her bladder is where she got this “quirk,” as it were, about needing to control the location of where she would meet people. That is, if she would meet them at all. For it wasn’t always guaranteed. In truth, she was becoming increasingly averse to going to any of her “safe” places to meet anyone, not even when they offered to pay for whatever she ordered.

Those who knew her were also aware that she wasn’t the type to have people over or be a guest in someone else’s home. Nor was she the type who could ever hold down something akin to a “steady job,” instead taking freelance projects that paid enough for her to take long breaks in between. However, all of these projects required nothing of her when it came to “going into the office.” She could work from home, whatever it is that was asked of her. For her to have any kind of job that required leaving her house would have been anathema. The last thing she wanted was 1) to have to be at the mercy of some corporate bathroom where you could so often hear other people shitting and 2) for everyone in the workplace to clock just how many times a day she needed to use “the facility.” As if she hadn’t been made to feel shame for that throughout her school years, a time in her life that felt interminable in large part because of how mocked she was for her bladder “issues.” But to Aida, they weren’t “issues.” It was simply a situation that needed a viable “workaround.” And her workaround was to scarcely leave her house or ever find herself in a scenario where a bathroom she didn’t approve of wasn’t immediately within range.

In this regard, she had counted her mother and grandmother as “lucky” that they were “stay-at-home moms.” Matriarchs expected solely to tend to the household and rear their children as opposed to going out (for both women were so “generously” exempt from having to do the grocery shopping). While most women of Aida’s generation would probably “pity” them for this lifestyle, Aida could see the many benefits to it. Chiefly, that one had to be at home all the time, therefore never at risk of pissing themselves in public. Oh sure, there was the risk that they might cause a child to die somehow while left unattended amidst one of their many bathroom breaks, but such was the price to pay for this kind of luxury posing as “hardship.”

As for Aida, she didn’t bother having children. Imagined that her general pelvic area couldn’t endure pregnancy if it could barely endure a sip of water. She figured her mother and grandmother only felt obliged to do it because it was what was expected of them. Aida and her generation, however, had broken free from the shackles of what were now deemed such antiquated societal expectations. Well, they were in the proverbial “big city” anyway. Which is what Los Angeles was, and where she chose to spend out her days, even if rarely going out to enjoy what said big city had to offer.

To those she met later in her life—the ones who hadn’t been lifelong friends that were versed in her “disability”—after moving to Los Angeles, her “condition” took more than some slight getting used to. That is, if they wanted to sustain any kind of meaningful friendship with her. This, Aida supposed, was why her friends were so few and far between. Not because any of them held it against her for refusing to go to The Cheesecake Factory—an apparent staple of the Los Angeles experience—due to her bathroom scruples.