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Between the shower and the drain
23.12.2021
While taking a shower recently, I decided to look down, turning my head until it was parallel to my feet. Water hit my hair and rolled around the back of my head, onto my forehead and to my eyes. The cohesion between the particles formed small droplets which ran their course, seemingly defying gravity by dribbling along my downward turned cheeks. They rolled along, many jumping off on loose strands of hair, until the remaining few joined at the crease just before the eyelashes of my left eye and the tension between the drops and my cheek broke, and the bundle fell.
My eyes open, I could see the little droplet plummet downward, the distance to my feet suddenly vast, a canyon with a suddenly frightening, alien depth. This droplet was remarkably round, as was the next, and the next, and the next… a small brigade, or a squadron maybe, of little droplets endlessly jumping to their honorable deaths.
It seemed to me that they fell fastest directly after leaving the crease of my eye, gradually slowing down as they dropped below. It was as though they were caught by a small parachute before disappearing into the vast shower-canyon below.
It was at this moment that my thoughts flitted to the following formula:
which describes the course of a free-falling object in relation to time. As time increases, the distance from the point where it began falling grows exponentially larger, as you can see by that two right there; the g stands, by the way, for gravity.
Had I not known better, not had the faint memory of the formula still lingering in my head from tenth grade physics, perhaps I would have been allured by the illusion before me. I would have thought that those small droplets did indeed fall softly, gradually slowing down until each small trooper of the shower-drop brigade found themselves safely on the floor, unharmed, ready to to pack up the parachute that caught its fall.
But I did remember the formula, so what was I seeing? Was it the perception relative to my eye? It really did seem that the droplets needed an increasingly large amount of time to distance themselves from my eye (fig. 1). And this would imply (fig. 2), as in, the speed of their fall would also decrease gradually. This is, sadly, in direct contradiction with both the formula from before, as well as common sense: things get faster as they fall, not slower. The graphs would be wrong.
Standing in the shower with my head parallel to my feet and my thoughts lost in the steam around me, I was only partially in the mood for common sense. So I began puzzling. How can I fix these graphs? What if what I was seeing WAS reality? Perhaps the droplets weren’t falling down to the ground, rather falling up to my eyes? This, I thought, would allow – thank god – for a compliance our favorite formula (with the two slight alterations, of course, that the force of gravity pulls to my eye, not to the center of the earth, and that time run backwards).
This comforting possibility would flip the graph into their expected trends (fig 3 and 4).
For a brief moment, I was satisfied, peacefully settling into my new reality wherein my eyelashes were the center of gravity and time ran backwards. But not long after, another dilemma traversed my thoughts… regardless of whether the droplets were abiding by the laws of (real) gravity and time or not, I am only witnessing a mere snippet of the course of the droplets. Once again, the faultiness of the perceived graphic course was sullied. They both failed to account for the speed of the droplets before and after they happened to pass through that particular space between my eyelash and the shower floor; they only showed a snippet in the true course of the droplets.
Further upsetting any true physicists reading this stream of consciousness, I adjusted my graphs, (fig. 5 and 6) and turned off the water.
But the idea that these water droplets exist beyond the realm between my eyelashes and the drain stuck with me. There’s something humbling in these two graphs of squiggles: the droplets that I see, that I relativize to my own perspective in the shower are all on a much longer journey of their own. They were rolling along some other surfaces far before they met my cheek and they’re continuing to roll – or be absorbed or who knows what—right now. They are matter, never to be created or destroyed, and I am lucky to spot them as they jump, unaware of my presence, into the unknown depths of the shower…
…and down the drain.
