All That Remains

Written by Miles VaranaPhotography by Noah Laroia-NguyenDo you ever worry you have too many plastic bags? You know what I’m talking about. The twisted polyethylene mass that grows, as we speak, under the kitchen sink, in the nook where you once kept that fabulous gravity bong. You’ve got quite the collection: Wal-Mart, GameStop, 7-Eleven, Panda Express, Jamba Juice. The bags are like the people from your hometown: thick, white, and transparent in key places. But unlike the people from your hometown, it hasn’t been ten years since you last saw the bags. No. You see the bags every damn day. They’re waiting for you every time you reach for dish soap, or Windex, or toilet bowl cleaner. And every time you come home to reluctantly make an addition to their ranks, the bags rustle in fervent, mocking excitement, as if aware that they will someday break from their lives of bondage in the cabinet to reach the promised land; broad, uncolonized, cigarette-reeking carpet. You can see it now. You’ll get up for work and wade, bags up to your chest, to the door. It’ll be fun, like living in the ball pit of a McDonald’s PlayPlace.  You kept the bags because you always figured that you would need them to pick up dog shit, if you ever got a dog. Five lease terms, two jobs and three girlfriends later, there’s still no dog. How can you use them? What goes into a plastic shopping bag after it’s emptied of the purchase that first necessitated its use? Trash? Too small. Loan statements? Only if Bernie Sanders runs in 2020. Memories of Girlfriend Number Three? You already have a spot for those—the liquor cabinet.  What do other people put in their bags? What storage requirements do they have that you don’t?One night, as you lay in fidgety pursuit of sleep, you find yourself unable to stop thinking about them. Instead of sheep, your tortured mind counts bags, leaping gracefully one-by-one over a sagging barnyard fence. At midnight, when streams of warm air begin to ebb and flow from the vent under the cabinet, you’re convinced you can hear the bags stir, as if aroused by the latticework touch of the heating system. You imagine them inflating with hot air and taking furtive flight, like electric jellyfish in a wine dark, not-so-distant sea. In sleep-deprived delirium you drift over to the bedroom window and gaze out at the streets of Anaheim. Empty red light intersections and Don’t Walk signs flashing like dog’s teeth. Hell-palms, swaying in the breeze. Why, oh why did you ever leave Canada for this? They certainly won’t go away on their own; plastic bags, you’ve heard, can live up to a thousand years in the wild, and probably even longer in captivity.  Maybe your neighbor, Mrs. Vladislava, will take them off your hands. You knock on her door. Too many bags! She exclaims. Do you know how many bags I had when I came to this country? Zero. I was bag-less! You attempt to protest. Look, Mrs. Vadislava... She cuts you off, her voice thick with a finality only widows and generals can muster. Young man, young man, I will not hear of it. Keep your bags. You never know when you will need them, especially at your age.If she won’t take them, perhaps the homeless, who you’ve noticed possess an abiding fondness for receptacles of all kinds, will. Better yet, you could take them for a scenic country drive in your Toyota Corolla and then abandon them on the side of the highway. This might be the most humane way; the bags could catch a westward zephyr and make their way by drainage ditch and tributary to join their brethren in the Pacific.  True satisfaction requires violent disposal. You could tie them to railroad tracks, drop them into a missile silo, or fill them up with someone else’s dog’s shit and light them on fire on Girlfriend Number Three’s new boyfriend’s front porch. These are all good options, but you know you’ll never get the bags out the front door. There’s nothing to carry them with.