Everything about this is wrong.
He is awake when he should be asleep.
He is in a building where he doesn’t live.
He is in the wrong kind of bathroom.
He is protesting the fact that you’ve gone.
But that’s why he’s here. He wants to learn
something about you from this distance:
what the kinds of places you go
without him look like, starting with this
deserted, faceless, universal,
intimate, functional place—a stall
like many others—a bare, cold seat,
and a quick way to get rid of unwanted
intentions. He is loitering, still
convinced of a need he could never explain.
As it happens, he is doomed
to walk away scot-free, to escape
self-knowledge on this score for years.