Between sheets

It’s not a nice, comfy feeling when you feel like shit. It’s not that you feel overwhelmed with joy and peace, or fulfillment and satisfaction. It’s not that you feel on top of the world. Quite  the contrary in fact - if you feel like shit, you feel like you were on the bottom of a dried out lake, cold and shaking, wrapped in rotting leaves, their bad smell enveloping you like an old, stale blanket. 

Shit: “How do you know I feel like that? I don’t even know what a dried out lake is. I do know rotting leaves, but I appreciate their company. And I like their smell, too. Question of taste. 

In fact, I can’t share your judgement about my feelings at all - I feel overwhelming joy and peace for just being me, just being shit. Full of acceptance of my condition, I wouldn’t like to be something else.”

Was it fever? Or was it real? Whatever it was, those words certainly did open my eyes to our anthropocentrism and absolute lack of empathy when we talk about the feelings of shit. You can’t apply the same norms to excrements as you do to humans. What makes us, people, happy, for instance - warm rays of sun on our faces - doesn’t necessarily make shit happy - it makes it thirsty, and dried out, above all. Any browner it doesn’t need to become.

It still is quite likely that I do feel like shit sometimes. Only not in the moments when I claim to feel like it. Don’t be unfair to shit. You know little of its feelings.