There are not many trips to the bathroom that result in staring into the void of cosmic madness. The toilet in Silesia City Shopping Centre is one of them.
I have theory that these loo’s were built by an ancient cult as a shrine to old Lovecraftian beings so terrible that to gaze upon them causes a brain fart that liquifies your mind into a primordial goo that drips out of your nose onto the floor. Then it crawls up other people’s noses and does the same to them. On and on until human consciousness is reduced to barely aware tepid soup for the old gods to devour.
The first inkling of this theory came to my mind as I walked down the long corridor to the toilets. On the walls there are shoulder height mirrors that reflect an infinite image of your head on each side of your peripheral vision. Already, the unknowable theme of infinity beckons your feeble understanding.
At the end of the corridor, hiding the doors to the loo's is a glass brick wall in the centre of a circle. The opaque glass obscures and distorts the shape of everybody that goes behind it. The journey to alter human form and perception has already begun. It’s not clear whether to go left or right at the end of the corridor and discombobulated shoppers can be observed completing circuits of the circle only to end up back where they started, looking older and more gaunt with each revolution.
If you don’t end up trapped in this nightmarish loop, and somehow find the right way, the next stage of the journey is filled with existential menace, dread and doubt. You are led into a silent and mirrored waiting area. A purgatory of sorts, full of wash basins and mirrors, and confusion as to where the door to the toilets actually is. You half expect to look in one mirror and see yourself as an old man and in the other a reflection of yourself as a foetus.
You paw the smooth handleless wall at the far end of the room for anything that resembles a handle. As you do the wall is opened from the other side revealing yet another layer of the descent into lunacy. A troubled looking man trudges out and walks towards the door that I have just walked through. It too has disappeared however, and there is only a smooth, unblemished wall in its place. The trail is disappearing behind me.
As if on cue, the door opens out from the other side and an innocent walks in. He finds the door at the other end of the room, without trouble and I slink in behind him and then... well nothing.
The toilets are unremarkable. Cubicles and urinals. White and red. Is this the hidden meaning? That at the end of all things there’s not a whimper or a bang, no great reveal, no cosmic revelation, just a meh?
I leave the way I came in and as I pass through the second door, I wonder, if a bear wees in the forest and there’s no one there to flush, did he really wee?
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