Most people, I think, feel divorced from their past as long as enough time passes. Of course, not every piece of their identity is severed, but some parts are, and among them, I suspect embarrassing memories are the first to go. Whether these memories contribute to your identity at the present moment is beside the point. They once belonged to you, and with the passage of time, they drifted elsewhere.

Anyway, this is the story of when I peed my pants in grade school.

The Palindrome woman was my teacher; I call her that because her surname was a palindrome. She was in her late twenties—but that’s probably still her name to this day. She would play songs at the start of each day to get us in the mood for learning or whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean because I learnt absolutely nothing. Among her poor selection of songs, “Shake it Off ” by Swift inevitably made its way into the list. She had been so hooked on the damn song that for a good month or two, it was all she ever played. To this day, I still remember the chorus in embarrassingly great detail.

At the end of the day, we’d all congregate near the door, like a plugged-up dam, waiting for the chime to ring. On this particular day, I had been wanting to visit the washroom for quite some time, but Ms. Shake-it-Off had asked me to wait since school would soon be over. Being the timid child that I was, I didn’t protest, deciding instead to hold it in. But by this point, my bladder had already been stretched taut, approaching maximum capacity, ready to burst at any given moment.

I decided it was in my best interest to stand closest to the door where I could rush out of the classroom the fastest. I could also conceal my uncomfortable circumstance among the herd of classmates; I didn’t have friends (they were in another class), so there was no need to worry about an unexpected conversation unfolding.

After sampling a range of options, I found that crossing my legs and crouching a little relieved the tension. But class had ended unusually early, and there was far too much time left until school ended. After some minutes, as I was approaching my limit, my entire existence served to withhold a vast amount of aqueous output and every ounce of my focus had been directed towards this purpose. I was wallowing in the depths of despair. At some point, amid the confusion of the crowd, some nincompoop bumped into my waist while fooling around with their friends. Your imagination is serving you right. The next moments leave me no choice.

Some marginal leakage was inevitable but, I managed to contain it. How, you might ask? I’ll try to make the next couple of sentences as euphemistic as possible: following external trauma to the waist, the chamber reached maximum pressure capacity, exceeding the threshold, expelling a small amount of golden runoff. But thankfully, the male body comes preinstalled with a sort of airlock, or vestibule, following the exit. If you manage to seal off this outer chamber mechanically, you can contain the damage.

So there I was, holding on (literally) for dear life, having prevented the hydration refund. Only a couple of seconds were left on the clock till the chime. The moment of liberation, though it took an eternity, eventually arrived, and as the door opened to reveal the sky, azure; the Victorian clouds belonging to oil sketches; the press-release parents; the dry smell of autumn and tanbark, I let my hand go and ran as fast as I could. But I shouldn’t have let go.

I turned a corner to avoid any attention, and as I was sprinting to the nearest washroom, I realized my mistake. Or rather, my mistake realizes itself. The aureate stream is warm and welcoming; the manifestation of liberation. It trickled down my inner thighs as I desperately rushed towards relief. My pants, thankfully, were black, and even though one couldn’t tell by looking, I was most definitely wet from the waist down. I don’t remember how I made it to the washroom, but eventually, I did.

I expelled whatever was left in the reserves, resigning myself to the sweet and pungent scent of ammonia rising from below. It was incredibly undignified and shameful, more than anything I’d felt before. After voiding the solution and zipping back up, I wrapped my jacket around my waist to conceal the dark stains. But as I waddled out of the washroom, careful to avoid contact with the residue, a classmate spotted me.

A few weeks earlier, the school talent show had taken place and she had participated. If I remember correctly, she danced. Hip-hop, I think. My friends and I were all duly impressed and thereafter, she remained an incandescent figure.

She didn’t notice the stains, but instead noticed the jacket covering the front.

“Why are you wearing your jacket like that?” she asked. It was a genuine question.

“Uhhhh…” I panic, and in a fit of fear, I managed to form the words, “I don’t know,” shrugging my shoulders.

Now, I have no clue how I got away with that response but she lets me go, somehow. I suspect she knew the truth. Partially relieved, I waddled to the usual pickup spot and reluctantly knocked on the window of my vehicle. My mother pulled the windows down.

「ごめん。おしっこ漏らした。」

And she looked at me with such shame in her eyes, in utter silence, realizing that she had given birth to a failure. She handed me a towel to keep under my seat, staring at me in disbelief.

The ride home was incredibly unpleasant. The interior of the vehicle reeked of piss. I don’t remember much else and I don’t want to either.

I try to forget these embarrassingly hilarious episodes, but I can never seem to outrun them. Not completely. I’m turning twenty this month, which I find odd and foreign regardless of how much I think about it. If you’re twenty and you’ve peed yourself, you understand.

Just shake it off, I guess.

Last modified on 2025-10-03