I suspect I'll continue doing that for a while.
Perhaps eventually the habit will disappear and the bathroom will return to being completely unremarkable.
But for now, there's always a tiny moment when I walk inside and remember that dark shape lying on the floor.
Something I nearly stepped past without noticing.
Something I initially dismissed as garbage.
Something that turned out to be alive.
A Small Lesson From a Strange Encounter
Looking back, what surprised me most wasn't actually discovering a leech.
It was realizing how quickly one tiny discovery could change the way I viewed a completely familiar environment.
One minute, I wasn't paying attention to the bathroom floor at all.
The next, I was examining every corner like an investigator.
That's probably the lesson I'll remember most.
Sometimes we become so accustomed to our surroundings that we stop really seeing them.
We walk through the same rooms every day.
We use the same sinks.
We step across the same floors.
We pass the same drains without ever wondering what's there.
Usually, there's no reason to wonder.
But every once in a while, something unexpected reminds us to look more closely.
In my case, it was a strange dark object on my girlfriend's bathroom floor.
At first, I thought it was trash.
Then I thought it might be rubber.
Then it moved.
And suddenly, an ordinary evening became a story I knew I wouldn't forget anytime soon.
The creature turned out to be what appeared to be a leech, and although the mystery of exactly how it arrived was never completely solved, the encounter certainly changed one thing.
I don't walk into that bathroom without looking at the floor anymore.
Because once you've discovered that the strange piece of "rubber" beside the drain is actually alive, it's surprisingly difficult to look at the bathroom the same way again.