Through the Toilet Bowl

She sits on the toilet bowl and does not feel like budging. It feels oddly comfortable, hedged in with the world shut out. The seat is warm and dry. The dull light hovers overhead, casting shadows all around her, a reminder that the past is always in the present.

Someone comes in through the main door and walks in to the next cubicle. The shuffling of clothes, awkward pauses and grunting reminds her how ugly the human body is made to be. A small smile creeps onto her face. She insipidly wonders what's for dinner.

Weariness blots her thoughts out so she closes her eyes and let it wander out of the window, along the trees swaying by the road, to the birds roosting high, to the cars that flash by. A voice bounces across the corridor, jarring the retarded calm.

A sigh, and a ripple. She stands, and water flows. Looking back at the dimmed, wrinkled reflection in the toilet bowl, she can almost imagine a white rabbit, plunging down.

He realises that writing for the public is very different from writing for himself; there are always things that he wants to say when he writes in private that he will never want to show to his readers. And this affects his writing significantly; they do not always reflect exactly what he wants to say, which is really the point - he hopes to protect himself when he is writing for the public, it doesn't matter if they do not get to read the truth in his heart. He finds it easier, yes, much easier, to publish like this. Perhaps that is why academia is a feasible option to him: it allows him to write in a seemingly objective, detached manner which conceals, rather than reveals, the very things on his heart. He knows the contradiction of publishing his own creative works, that it essentially brings about the evaporation of his privacy, the very thing he tries so hard to protect his whole life.