How much of a life goes into never seeing your own shit. There's a whole room for it, with a door that closes, a mechanism that carries it out of sight before you've fully stood up, and a network of pipes under the street taking it somewhere you'll never visit. We are, as a civilization, extraordinarily good at making our waste disappear, and it's strange how rarely anyone stops to notice that a person can live a life and never once really look at what leaves their body.

The instinct goes much wider than the body. Most people handle a feeling the same way, and it starts with a verdict, learned early, that some part of you is unspeakable and had better be kept out of sight. So there's interior plumbing for grief and anger and shame, a flush for each. And it all leans on one belief nobody questions, that what you flush is gone. But you can't get rid of yourself. Every refused sadness and swallowed frustration, all of it came from inside you, and it stays yours the way your waste stays yours. It may be out of sight, but it lies in the dark and waits, and it mutates, until the thing you flushed has grown into something you'd recognize even less than what you tried to get rid of.

Then one day it climbs back up wearing your own face and reminds you that it's you. Whether being forced to finally look saves a person or destroys them is never certain. But this much is: what we won't carry, we bury, and the pipes under the street are only a burial with better manners. Bury something alive, even a feeling, and it's a fair bet it will claw its way back to the surface with a VENGEANCE.