Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles by Ron Currie Jr.

the one thing standing between me and soiled underwear is the industrial neutrality of a public bathroom stall. And even then I’ll fight it, as long as the fight seems winnable. A lot of people don’t realize one can battle most any bowel movement into stasis. As with many things, it’s a mental game. There’s almost never any real danger of shitting yourself; there is only the question of how much discomfort you can tolerate. And I can tolerate a lot.
    If I found myself searching for Emma even as we sat side by side at a bar, if I found myself missing her, somehow, even in the midst of coitus, then part of that was her fault, certainly, part of that was her peculiar way of hiding in plain sight, the way her face set itself in neutral, an impenetrable expression of absolute containment, a vault of self.
    But might that distance also be my fault, in part? Did I lie by omission to avoid her displeasure? Did I censor and groom myself out of desperation to have her, and did she intuit that the me I presented was an ill-fitting flesh suit, a character from one of my books who defied the laws of both his own nature and nature at large, a character who, for example, seemed never to need to take a dump?
    Before the island we spent weeks together, rarely leaving each other’s sight; thus few or no opportunities for me to use the bathroom. Add to this the fact that eating, and eating well, was among her favorite ways to pass time and satisfy a multitude of appetites: for sustenance, for ambience, for companionship, for aesthetics. We ate pâtés and terrines and galantines, great steaming bowls of mussels, duck confit dripping salty globules of fat, rare hanger steaks plump with warm blood, spit-roasted pork loins. Preceded by whiskies and bourbons, accompanied by wines red and white, followed with cordials. And the desserts: chocolate peanut butter tortes, champagne-infused sorbets, stomach-rupturing blocks of bread pudding.
    All this, and me too shy to use the toilet.
    I agonized. I cramped and bloated and hobbled about with a body so full of intestinal gas—gas that I could rarely vent, even on the sly, because the irony of course was that the longer I held a shit, and the more it built up after every expensive fat-laden meal, the worse it smelled—that I worried, a couple of times, that I might actually burst somewhere inside myself. I lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling while she slept beside me, and suppressed groans while violent cramps rippled through my gut.
    So really when I stop to think about it, I realize that my not taking a shit when I needed to, when you unpack that and extrapolate it, is really a kind of betrayal of self. Do you follow? No less than, say, pretending to like a movie because you think it will please a person you want desperately to please. Or else sitting calmly and smiling at a dinner party when someone’s acted in a way that makes you want to flip tables and throw glassware. To smile through a movie you loathe, or to refrain from breaking things, is a betrayal of self.
    And when you try to
live
there, to live in a place where you’re betraying yourself over and over, not only do you grow to resent the hell out of it, and resent the hell out of whomever you’re betraying and censoring yourself for, but the very idea of your self begins slowly and inexorably to erode. Until you realize one day out of the clear blue that you have no idea who your self is, anymore.
    This was what I was doing every time I had to take a shit around Emma and chose not to. Chipping away at myself, assuming a persona that looked like me but was not. I know it sounds ridiculous. I know. But it’s the truth. And every time she went to work or yoga and I would steal upstairs, secure in the knowledge that she’d be gone long enough both for me to shit and for the stink to dissipate before she returned, there was a shame in my relief. At first I thought it was just some