My toilet at home has a silver flush lever that has eroded with use. There are little patches of rust on it now sprouting in clusters like cold metallic fungus. Sometimes a flake of silver comes off in my hand and I wash down the sinkhole. It goes down with the soap suds into some angular underworld of pipes: the sucking, slurping, gurgling intestines of sanitation infrastructure. Sometimes when I think about it I feel a bit anxious. Along with the contents of my bowels, the little silver flake is shooting through pipes to somewhere else, for someone else to deal with, to clean, to bleach.
 

Timothy Morton: “The trouble is we now know that there’s no such thing as over yonder. Whenever you flush the toilet, you are flushing whatever is in there to somewhere like the Pacific Ocean, or the Gulf, or the Waste Water Treatment Plant, or the Atlantic. There’s no “away.””

 

Flushing the toilet, I sometimes suddenly notice how the world collapses in on itself a little bit, like winded lungs and spasming diaphragms. I imagine my shit and that silver shard winding through the pipes to smack someone else in the face at the other end. Why do I even bother to lock the door? Everything I do smears itself through the world. Everything the world does smears itself through me. That flush sound is not really the noise of removal, of “away”, it's the noise of deep fusion, my skin grafting itself onto the crust of the world.