Where Does All This Shit Go?

I woke up this morning and did some hip openers. I know it sounds very insignificant, but for the last two days I have been telling myself: another day to try.

I admitted to myself that I think I feel lost. Nothing makes sense. I also admitted—while I kinda knew that I've been grieving—that this season, the grief has been a lot more intense. For at least the last six or seven months, I have been going through consistent bouts of depression. Couple that with my feeling of placelessness, and I had to admit: I felt lost.

I resolved, reflecting on the last time I felt like this, that perhaps I need to go back to the drawing board. School has taken up so much of my life. All of it is responsibilities and my need to ensure that I get it done. But do I even want to get it done?

Anyway. I woke up, told myself it's another day to try. I grabbed my two phones and began walking to the kitchen. The normal routine is to do what I do on my yoga mat, go to the kitchen, make some tea and/or coffee. On my way to the kitchen, I noticed that the door to the second bedroom was open, so I went in to close it.

No one is in that room really. I wanted a two-bedroom apartment for a few reasons: (1) To have a place to store my artwork that I create, as well as double as a creative studio and (2) To have a place for when guests come—my friends or fam, they can sleep.

The people I would have sleep in my home, though, would have to be people that I'm comfortable with sleeping in my home. My space is quite sacred to me, and so I am mindful of who I invite into my home. After some people have left, I have gone on spiritual fumigation journeys through my home. I am certain sea salt, palo santo, and sage are quite sick of me at this point. Maybe I should consider dried amaga and some Florida water too? Anyway, the two primary people who have use of the room are my younger sister, but before that it was an ex who practically lived in the space. But right now, it's empty.

I walked into the room and decided: let me pull the window curtains a bit open, let some light in. Through that one-way tinted window, I saw that our trash is being taken. The trash for the apartment is being taken by a boy. A young man—he's not a man-man. He doesn't look that grown. He wears a ring on his left middle finger, silver. And he does the work with such familiarity.

I'm here looking at him sorting through the trash to pick out metals, big plastic containers. He takes the big bags of trash that we, the tenants, have tied to put in the trashcan. He takes them out and throws them into the makeshift trash carrier. It's a three-wheeler tricycle, blue, that has been reinforced vertically with wooden plywood slabs to carry a lot more trash. He throws the bags of our trash into this container, then climbs up into the container to rip the bag open so that he can spread the things out and cover more surface area.

I wonder: does it not stink? Is it not uncomfortable? He's not even wearing gloves.

We tie our trash. Let me speak for myself: I tie my trash because, well, in the tropics, by tying your trash you prevent ants, you prevent the cats—the stray cats in the street, chickens, and strays, everything—from getting into them.

Here I am watching a boy younger than my younger sister digging through this pile. His phone just rang. He picks the phone, looks who's calling, answers. He's digging through the trash with one hand—the blue or green trash bins that my landlord set outside for the tenants, he goes through that with one hand—while holding the phone in the other, sorting, picking up the metals.

When I came back to go this time, my landlord has been doing some construction on his property. I see the property, but I am visually aware that it's not mine. I am only a tenant. And from the construction, there are residue of cement. I saw that he has changed all his windows from louver blades to sliding windows, and I think he may have changed some door handles as well. So all of the metal scraps from the old fixtures are in the trash that this boy is sorting out.

Did I say he's not wearing gloves? But he has Wellington boots on. That makes me happy.

I had my own pair of Wellies when I was young. They were small. I'd wear them and my dad would wear his, and we'd walk into the farm behind the boys' quarters of where we lived—the bungalow of Mr. Collington. Wellies are always helpful.

This system of attaching plywood to the sides of tricycles to pick up trash has become a private business endeavor since the Ghanaian sanitation system failed—I forget how long ago.

For someone with sensory sensitivity like myself, I can barely keep my breath when I'm walking past a car because I can smell the exhaust so strongly. The sewage smell of open gutters along the streets and villages and various parts of Accra makes me want to vomit. Sweet-smelling perfumes also make me want to vomit. It's in instances like this that I am very convinced that people are built very differently.

Is there a kind of "getting used to" that happens? Digging through people's trash?

I worked as a nursing assistant for years, cleaning people's shit and pee, and I never got used to the smell. It was always very hot. But I did it anyway. And I'm not saying that perhaps this gentleman is used to this. Maybe he is. But also maybe it's not, and it's its own version of hard. But it's a necessary job, because the government is not taking out the trash. Someone has to.

But then that leads me to the next question: where does all this shit go?

Every time I have to tie my garbage in a plastic bag—and I know why I do it—I think: why am I buying plastic to tie up trash that is going to go God knows where and cause how much more pollution? Every time I buy a bottle of water, I worry about the bottle. When I buy groceries and they put them in plastic bags, I reuse them, but they still end up in the trash. When I open my favorite cookies and I'm done eating them, I worry about the trash. I keep wondering: where do all of these things go? And is there a way that I could, in my life, minimize waste?

Whenever I have biodegradable stuff, I wish there was a pot of soil or some land I could just throw it onto—where the birds and the insects and the ants and the stray dogs and the stray cats and the goats and the sheep could take from it. That's what we used to do: you take food waste, and you throw it outside, because other living things will eat it. And even if they didn't, it went back into the soil.

But now? We put food waste in plastic bags. In the trash.