The room

I painted a toilet for three weeks.
Not intentionally, it just happened that way.
Every time I walked into the room I told myself,
today it happens.
Then I stood in front of it,
and it stood in front of me,
and that was it.
The day was over.

At some point it became too present.
Too self-aware.
Too much like me.
So I stopped using it.
No drama.
I switched to peeing in the sink.
It worked.
The sink didn’t judge.

The painting moved at a strange pace.
A small touch,
two hours of nothing,
another touch,
leave the room,
come back,
check that it’s still there,
that it didn’t decide to change on its own.

There were days I didn’t paint at all,
just thinking
who gets stuck on a toilet for three weeks
and still calls himself an artist.

When I finished,
there was no feeling of achievement.
Just a small relief
that it went back to being a painting
and I could go back to peeing like a human being,
more or less.