...water pounding against my back and running down my body to disappear in the drain...washing away a day's dirt and sweat, the proof that I lived that day...washing away sleep, and the night before...making me a different person...

After spending so long living on this world, everything sort of blurs together. Day in and day out you do the same thing. Nothing really changes... You wake up, get ready for the day, possibly eat breakfast, and leave... Then you get home and do something, but it's not really important...it never is. Then you sleep. And, of course, at some point in there, you shower, or bathe. It doesn't matter which...or when it happens. It just matters that you do, because that is when you wash away the day before, put it behind you so that it is just another day from your past, just another day of nothing special to add to your collection.

But it changes you too. I shower in the morning, to wash away the night before and wake up. I would be a zombie in the morning otherwise... And when I step into the shower in the morning, I am myself. I am dirty, with the accumulated grime of a day of life, nothing significant compared to the stain on my soul caused by existing for a thousand years. I am natural, because people are not clean...but still I am unnatural, because I am not really a person. I am just a puppet of the magic, even after being freed, trying to live from day to day without letting the humans that surround me know that I am not like them.

In the shower I change. I wash away that day's grime, and the night. I wake up, and am again "ready" to face another day of living...if you can call it a life. I come out clean. And it's all a lie. The shower's magic is more powerful than anything I could ever do. It washes away the dirt, making it seem to all the world that I am a clean, decent person, and they believe it. It makes me what I am not...allows me to live the constant deception that I pretend is a real life. Without it, I would never be able to face the world, because, like people, I am not clean.

Yet it's still all the same. Every day, I wake up, shower, dress, eat, leave, come home, eat, do something, and sleep again...only to wake in the morning and do it all over again. Every day I go through the metamorphosis of the shower...I go in my true self and come out a lie... But it doesn't matter, because even if I can fool those around me, I know what I am, and what I've done. And, of course, because it will never really change. I may be remade each morning by the shower, but by the end of the day I will be dirty again, showing myself to the world as I truly am, not that anyone will ever notice.