The Garbage Collector

It’s not that I don’t understand my job. It’s not that at all. I am the one tasked with removing the evidence. It’s not complicated. The items to be removed are unpleasant reminders of a truth that you don’t want to acknowledge. Let’s all pretend it’s not happening, happening under our very noses, and so I’m called in to whisk it all away, in the middle of the night, as the theatrics of the matter would have it. 

It’s called “magic,” and that’s how everyone refers to it, and that’s endlessly amusing to me. Me! Magical! There’s absolutely nothing about my appearance that would imply glitter or gold or stardust or wishes or anything like that sort of nonsense. I’m utterly ordinary, even boring. That fact doesn’t bother me one bit, but the descriptions of me, the picture you paint for the people who don’t know me, that does sometimes cause me a bit of annoyance. I’m essentially a garbage collector, after all. Nothing glamorous about it.

When you describe me, it’s always fantastical. It’s a little bit secret, and very special. The work I do - basically trash removal - is described as something full of mystic power. But there you get stuck, because why would anyone want the trash? Why would anyone collect it if it just wasn’t simply their job to remove something unwanted? The most interesting part - and it isn’t mystical - is my ability to enter and exit a building silently. That certainly doesn’t warrant much fanfare.

The best part is that you pretend I leave something in return. This is the part that always causes the puzzle. If you left off this part, it might be much easier to believe. It might be easier to swallow that YOU are actually behind the whole thing, and it’s not about me, and it’s not about them, it’s really just about YOU. 

But you pretend. I watched you this time, though you didn’t see me; you put out a little note, tucked into a tiny satin pouch, accompanied by five dollars. I’ve trained myself not to care that you sign my name to these ridiculous notes, but this time, I’m seriously peeved. You say that I wanted the item, that I collect them and use them to build my house. What an odd thought. You couldn’t come up with anything better? I’m tired of being misrepresented in such embarrassing ways.

In the end, it’s all for them, you say. But that’s not the truth at all. It’s removal of something you don’t want to acknowledge. I take away the evidence of the passage of time. I leave “magic,” or rather, you do, because you want things to stay just as they are. 

It’s not magic at all - it’s bone and flesh, actually bone pushing through flesh, and old bone that’s discarded. The bone is rotting; it’s pulled away from the flesh and that’s why it’s fallen out, and sometimes even a nasty color. You don’t want to think about that idea... being replaced. You don’t want to think about that pushing up, pushing away, how inevitable it is.

You want everything to stay, just as it is, but it won’t. You know that, but you don’t want to know it, and so you have me come, remove the reminders, and then you sprinkle everything in glitter.  It seems to hold things in place for a time, but really, aren’t we all just kicking the can down the road? In the end, they always find out the truth anyway. I’m sick to death from the saccharine version of myself so widely publicized, and I’m hoping to correct the narrative.  Whatever you want from me, I can’t deliver it, and the sooner you realize that, the better off we all are.