One of my strange, nerdy hobbies is trash collecting. I get up very early in the morning and grab my backpack. I always carefully pack my backpack the evening before; I make sure I have my flashlight (because its still dark when I go out, before the garbage men come to take the trash away), extra batteries, old newspaper (incase I need to wrap up anything fragile), folders (I find a lot of interesting papers), two ink pens (one could bust! Or quit working!), four packs of labels (I carefully label each piece of trash, with the address I found it at and the date I found it), a tiny little pocket knife (incase I need to rip into trash bags), maps (if I get lost in the dark), and empty trash bags - if I have to rip a trash bag open, one full of somebody else’s trash, logically that trash bag is no longer useful. So, as a symbol of respect to the garbage men, who surely take a lot of grief about their jobs, and deserve far more than whatever they get paid, and are always in a big hurry and so can’t stop to gather up the scattered contents of a ripped open trash bag; and as a sign of thanks to the person that created that trash for letting me take it if I want it, I re-bag any trash bag I rip open, unless I just make a tiny little rip in it that wouldn’t matter. So I get my backpack, then, I go out around the neighborhoods, digging through the trash to see if there’s anything good there. By ‘good’ I mean anything interesting. And there are some very interesting things there. I could rave all day and through the night and all tomorrow about the things I’ve found. Absolutely the second-best thing I have ever found was a beautiful eight-inch-high marble statue of Athena; on the base is engraved her name in both English and Greek, and underneath the base is chiseled the message “handmade in Athens”. Gods in heaven, tell me please, who on earth in their right mind would throw away such a thing? As soon as I found her, I promptly bundled Athena in the old newspapers; how ridiculous she looked in them. I felt terrible for putting her in it. But then, when I got home, imagine it. Because there are three high points in trash collecting; one, before you go out, the anticipation of wondering what you are going to find today; two, the actual going out and finding things; and three, the best part, getting back to where you live and getting to sit down in good light in the comfort of your home, and getting to examine the things you’ve found, really look at them good, because when you’re out finding you’ve only got time to pick a thing up, make a quick decision, and either pack it away or put it back in the trash; time’s a-wastin’, the garbage men are a-comin’. It’s a race against time.
I said Athena was the second-best thing I’ve ever found; that’s because I found one thing that was better. I found it one morning in the first trash can I looked in; a jumble of papers. I picked one up, saw a few intriguing words, and picked out every piece of paper in the bag, stuffed them all in a folder, and labeled the folder; or at least, I meant to label the folder. I realized I’d forgotten my ink pens. This had happened once or twice before, a long time ago (I thought I was experienced enough to where it wouldn’t happen, but apparently, I wasn’t). So I just went without the labels for today. What a mistake.
When I got back to my apartment, I got to inspect what I’ve found – not much. Hardly anything besides the pages, just little nick-nacks that I would probably throw away myself later on; they had seemed worth keeping in the dark earlier this morning, but now, maybe not. Then I got to the pages. About half the pages were printed off a computer, and, I saw with glee, numbered, but the other half of the pages were hand-written on loose-leaf. So I got the typed pages in order. In the end, I had a set of twelve typed pages that went together, and a second set of seventeen of the handwritten pages. I started reading the hand-written ones first, but found the handwriting so small and messy I couldn’t go on. So I started on the typed set; there was no title; at least, no title that had been typed, but above the first typed paragraph was written by the same hand that wrote the loose-leaf pages “short-story”. I read on; maybe I had something here.
It turned out, I did have something there. It was a short story. The best short story ever written. I firmly believe it was, to this day.
I don’t think I can describe my feelings as I read it, not to a non-trash-collector, at least; and any trash collector wouldn’t need a description anyway. Let me say simply that I was dancing and prancing on liquid sunshine as I read it, until the sun imploded of old age and its rays vanished and I found myself plummeting earthward into darkness – because the words ended abruptly at the very bottom of the page twelve, in mid-sentence. There could be any number of pages that were supposed to come after page twelve, but they weren’t in my possession.
I am the sort of person that gets obsessed with things very easily. I’ve got a new oneI could tell this short story I had was already an obsession – I’ve got a new one every month or so. It’s safe to assume the author finished writing the story (the chance was small, very small, that he had decided the story was going nowhere in the exact spot where one more word would have started a new page on his word processing program), but in that case, where are the last pages? Did he accidentally not throw away all of the pages? Did he throw the last pages away before or after I had found them? Or did he throw them away, and I just missed them in the actual trash in his trash bag? I was pretty sure I hadn’t, but it was a possibility. Or had I lost the pages? Had they slipped out my hands in the darkness and I never realized?
So I was positively heartbroken. I had forgotten my ink pen and not labeled these pages. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Triple stupid. I couldn’t remember what street I had been down (though I wracked my brains), let alone what house or apartment I had gotten them from. Which effectively ruined any hope I had of finding who had written this story, but that didn’t stop me from trying. One thing I thought of trying, which I was particularly proud that I had thought of it, was searching the internet for key words, phrases, and sentences – to no avail. Logically, if the author wasn’t pleased with his story, it wasn’t going to show up on the internet. I did have a very, very vague idea of what area of town I had been in, and I made up a batch of fliers that I slipped under windshield wipers, tucked in mail slots, taped to telephone poles and notice posts on street corners, but again, nothing. I hadn’t any clues. I tried calling various desks and offices in the town’s governmental bureaucracy, to ask for anything about local writers. No results from that, other than my blood pressure going up. The few other things I had gathered that day didn’t give me any hints as to where I had been, either. The handwritten notes, though I could make out some of the handwriting (I spent a lot of time perusing it all) helped me not at all.
I more or less figured out lots of things about the author, for instance, he was male, he was young, probably my age or less, not married, going through a rough time in his life, and had been raised without a mother or mother-figure in his life. Of course, I didn’t know any of these things for certain; I only figured them out by a long, long process of studying the story and making conclusions from the hidden meanings, the unspoken words. In other words, I read between the lines. I deduced things about the writer Holmes-style.
More than anything else that irked me about the whole thing (and there was A LOT) was that I couldn’t understand for the life of me why he would throw away such a perfect piece of literature. Because it was, was perfect.
I was driving myself crazy trying to figure out who had written this story.
I am the sort of fellow that broods and dwells on the past. A lot of the time I look back at my life and think about all the sad things in it. Sometimes I compile lists of the saddest things. And strangely, I find that number one on the list is always, always the fact that I never found out how that short story ended, or who wrote it. Never. To this day, I don’t know. The short story I found, the best thing I ever found trash collecting, is a dead-end story, just like this one, this story I’m telling. Though it shouldn’t be, the thought is heartbreaking to me.