Garbology

No trash bag. No trash bag to harness the contents of the garbage bin, so that all the chewing gum he's been eating to mask the taste of cigarettes and other vices have hardened on the plastic bottom; those mouldy raspberries he threw away are there too, clumped in a little dry pool of their own juice at the, their little blue fuzz-blankets growing thicker every day. This is probably why the fruit flies have congregated in that corner of his bedroom. What else is in the bin? A bunch of crumpled-up papers that his mother couldn't ride his ass about recycling anymore. They're past school assignments, some from seventh grade all the way to tenth; none from eleventh, naturally. When he threw them out, all those assignments, he wondered why he'd kept them this long anyway. They were trash; they belonged in the trash. They'd been hiding out in his desk – that big wooden desk that his mom had sent with him when he'd decided to move out: a big ugly thing, an eyesore. Purely functional, though not for him. He'd decided to clean it out the other day so he could set up an ad for it online. Get rid of it, get some cash for it. It took up too much damn space and he didn't use it anyway. He asked forty bucks for it. He needed the money. Didn't know how in hell he'd get the desk out of his apartment, but he'd worry about it later. In the trash bin beneath all those crumpled papers, a whole bunch of broken glass. Blue glass with black and green swirls inside. A bong had broken inside one of his desk drawers and he'd procrastinated cleaning it out for quite a while,until now. He threw away the big chunks and actually mustered up the courage to ask to borrow his neighbour's vacuum so he could suck up the little shards left over in the drawer. He wanted the desk to be nice for whoever bought it. He kept picturing a little kid reaching in and getting glass stuck in her fingers, or something. So he cleaned the glass up and threw it away, along with the many receipts that had been stuffed in the same drawer. One was for a purchase he'd made just last week. He'd been told by his new boss at the warehouse that the boots he'd snagged proudly for five dollars at the Salvation Army didn't meet current safety protocol and that he needed to buy a new pair before his next shift. He raced around on the city bus that night, trying to find a decent deal. The best he could do was $180. He charged his chequing account but had insufficient funds. He charged his Visa. Two days' pay. Worry about it later. He left the store and worried about it. When he got back to his tiny apartment, he cried. Cried when he looked over his bank statements. Cried over the phone to his mom; he didn't know what he was doing, he was dirt broke, he missed free Wifi, none of his friends ever came around anymore. He cried out four months' worth of stress and rent and blew his nose into crumpled-up tissues. Those tissues never made it to the garbage bin.

#creative