Ode to a Toilet

Illusions of grandeur oftentimes fill my head, flitting with images of things that could never come to pass. It's in the moments before I settle my head into the comfortable groove of my pillow, or the split-second between my mouth and my fork as I imagine the synapses at the front of my scalp bursting with fireworks with the taste, or even when I flick my blinker in my car to switch lanes and picture that I'm speeding through traffic like a professional. Like I could weave in between everything that tried to pass by me, seeing it in my rearview mirror and deciding that, no, I don't want that, thanks. But, that is just that: illusions.

Imagine the ability to decide that. To simply deny. To tell God that, no, I am not required to think of that.

I forgot to mention one other time when images would run rampant, like oxen trampling the grasslands into submission. It's those moments in your own bathroom. The full quiet that surrounds you as you set your ass (or lack of ass) on the seat that adorned the white ceramic, when your brain pricks at thoughts that flood your own mental highway and sorts them out.

There's an unloading of two kinds in bathrooms, at toilets. No matter where you are, no matter how you are, no matter when it is, the restroom is where your body shivers with settling. The boulders of your soul shifting inside your caricature to fit your whole. I can't tell anyone how many times that, at a too-loud party, I'd step into the residential piss place where a couple might have been making out just minutes ago, just to feel the too-loud bass thrum through the too-thin walls. Despite the noise, I could feel my skull expanding to fill the space, to let the music drum its fingers in between my hair and bone. And in it, there was peace. There was understanding between me and the knitting of the universe.

Through the haze of any substances I may or may not have consumed, I finally slip my fingers inside the knots of my thoughts and pull them apart.

Earlier today, I was visiting my parents. That's probably why I was here, among strangers. Visits with the parents always bring out the worst, you know? Even if they don't do anything, there's just a trickle down of emotions, beginning with "oh, this isn't so bad," to the subsequent "maybe things are different" or "maybe they're tricking me" or "what if it was always like this and I'm the crazy one," and finally completing the collapsing pyramid of wine glasses with thoughts like, "I can never get past this" and "fuck this, I should just blow town and do me for me" and "I miss this so much but I know too much now" and "how long can this go on" and "FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU" and "I hope you both get better." So, yeah, maybe I'm sifting through the crowd because I was visiting my parents, and they brought up funerals.

"I just know the only one I can trust to bury me properly is Jay here," Mom said to Dad, lightly touching my shoulder, as if it were a joke. Dad just nodded, not continuing with any other thoughts. There was a quiet acknowledgment that we all agreed he wasn't lasting longer than Mom. Men always die before their wives, it's just because they're dumber, simply put.

"Just cremate me, please," Dad finally allows, "I don't want to be stuck in the ground." Hearing this at 22, with $61 in my bank account, I felt that familiar panic associated with death. The tendrils of it slither up my spine, slipping inside my earlobes and poring through the wrinkles of my insides while they caress the back of my eyeballs with long fingernails, and whisper with a cracked voice. It says, "your parents are not staying forever and you can't do a single fucking thing about it because it'll be your back that their legacy lays on." I have no idea how they spoke about it so casually, especially without life insurance to their name. Maybe it's because it will genuinely be my responsibility to care for them. They wouldn't have shit to worry about, so why worry? It's not their banks getting broken. It's awful to think, yes, because it really shouldn't be your parents' cost of death that makes me anxious about it, it should be their absence, their missing-ness, the space that opens up in the universe that I will try my best to fill with stars, only to find that all of them are already going supernova. A death that's happened so long ago but is just simply unaware of itself.

I didn't reply to them. I let the conversation past in such awkward stillness that I wondered if they could hear my ligaments scraping along each other as I uncomfortably shift in my seat. I let them fall into that pit of silence, as if they were already dead, just corpses sitting in seats next to me. And now.

Here I am. I hug myself as I shut the bathroom door behind me, my hands clutching at my elbows. It's incredibly difficult to keep my hands calm. And I see my sanctuary.

A toilet. The seat cracked above the styrofoam innards, apt to pinch my ass as soon as I sat on it. So, dutifully, I pull my pants down, my fingertips numb with--fuck it--the five cocktails, one large rum and coke, a toke on a joint that was definitely not passed to me first, and I plop my happy ass on there, waiting for any sort of flood from inside to make itself seen. I don't think I had it in me. I know I didn't, actually. As I described earlier, I wanted the bass to massage the thoughts away.

That's the true fantasy of a bathroom. Here, as I said, this is the knot unraveling along the base of the toilet. I exhale through my teeth, throwing my hand back and staring at the ceiling above me, like I was receiving a shot from God. The knot was spreading from my lips, down through my intestines, a perfect string that had no bundles along its length. No, I was wrong.

Toilets like this are where the folds of the universe show itself. And, I realize, thinking through the folds, that the ultimate, the ultimate ultimate ULTIMATE fantasy is to sit here...and think of nothing. To have no knots. No bundles. No nooses tightening around your arms, legs, neck, pulling you and ripping your tendons as all the things like death, filing taxes, 9-to-5s, all these annoying parties make claim to your flesh. Maybe I can get there.

Maybe I can close my eyes right now. Yes, like this. Hearing the world live outside of me, without me, letting me sit here on the shitter, with my chin pointed to the sky past the ceiling. If you're religious, maybe you'll be able to feel the soft fingers of God sliding up your chin with love, to say It's okay. If not, then it's okay to do it to yourself.

Here, speaking to the ceramic angel, you are your own best fantasy. Able to finally walk across this Earth, unburdened, unhindered, un-whatever you'd describe it as. Deserving to just not do anything. To truly relieve yourself of all that is wrong in your head and otherwise.