Sink

What is this structure that assumes our ills, indiscriminate and efficient in its execution? It treats tears and phlegm alike—as substance to be swallowed. Rushed off in a liquid torrent, the substance disappears into the void without the dignity of a proper farewell. It descends into the darkness, left alone to travel through the channels that lead it to its final home. But to us, its disappearance is nothing more than a foregone conclusion, one we forget with a splash of water to the face.

In casting off the signs of our humanity and leaving them for the sink, we do all we can to deny our status as creatures fashioned in the likeness of an inferior god. We might ponder a separate universe in which there is no need for a sink to do the dirty work for us.

At times the sink grows tired of its submissive role, vomiting up the Other we tried to forget. The plumber's duty is to quell this upwelling of congealed history, which reappears as an amorphous blob of human hair that thoroughly affronts us.

History is not a linear progression. Seeking its program in the imitation of the sink, it is nothing more than a chain of periodic protests by the Other—those forgotten events embedded in time that reappear in altered form, though no less revolting. History's disease is beyond the scope of the plumber, and an ill of which no sink is suited to dispose.