For Sale: Street Trash, Never Dying

I saw a bit of trash this morning. It was in the parking lot: cups, straws, water bottles, and a grocery sack in a meandering line. They were all plastic, their bodies formed by last week’s whims and built to last forever, now streaked with grime and morning dew. They called to mind a half-dozen semigloss photos of ocean plastic that I once saw in a cold white gallery. The caption beneath those photos said that a single use plastic water bottle might survive in the ocean for over a thousand years, functionally immortal, beat over and over by the tide and the surf.

I thought to myself how this morning's parking lot garbage, like coastal detritus, also washed to its asphalt shore. How it was scuttled up and rolled over itself, over and over, before coming to rest on the assumed property of an asinine landscape developer.

I sometimes wonder if we are not someone else’s trash, awash on the cosmic strand, a disposable whim built for temporary purpose and left to lie in the dirt and the dew. If so, we are frightening in our permanence, littering the vast nothingness of space with unpredictable ejaculations of radio light and hot steel. We cannot be undone. Our remnants will sink into the clay and become a wide, discernible ring in the trunk of the great planetary tree. Immortal, like ocean plastic.

If there is a great Someone out there amidst the dying stars, do they look at us with contempt? Do they sneer at us and pass by, in too much of a hurry to clean us up? Or maybe it's worse than that: maybe we are a failed project that never should have been begun. I do not want to know the answers.

If that great contemptuous Creature is watching, they have my pity. For while they feel only galactic disdain for us, we, in our hovels of junk, feel our lives as far more. We feel the individual ambient aches that keep us from rest as we lie in bed. We feel the sear of the sun that burns us when all we want is a little warmth. We know the universe as a bitter, indifferent expanse, and many of us fight so hard not to return its pain in kind. We know the stars, the sea, the parking lot. From them, we have learned that though we are sometimes unsightly, we are also quite small.

I believe that there is peace in being small. Let the skies roll above you. You do not need to rise to meet them. ♥