big blue
There’s someone I see every day. Let’s call her Linda. Linda collects rich people’s dirty laundry every day, in big blue polyethylene bags. Linda has deep, heavy-set eyes perched on a big round face. She says, “can I get your laundry?” but her eyes — they say something else. They pose something I don’t think I could quite convey in words, but if I had to summarise it, it would sound something like, “how did life spoil before even getting to the good part?”
If I ever were to meet a gregarious alien life-form, one aspect I would feel obliged to explain about our species is that we have a knack for hierarchical structures. All sorts of hierarchies, and they’re ever-changing too. Hierarchies are rarely formed with such granular precision naturally, and so, to help us, we have props in the form of rather ill-conceived narratives to justify our place in the world. This far-reaching consensus goes so far as being the son of God, or Brad Pitt, and the like, to being something worse than nothing at all. And get this — we’ll have a story for why that’s justified too. The aliens can say what they want, but pray grant us this: we are an imaginative species.
The best parts of my day are unassuming: intercalary flashes of humanity cached within understated dialogues. Little moments where we seem to have temporarily forgotten the script. Come back to awareness. Come back to the “we’re all trapped together on this rotating blue ball circling around another flaming ball, where only death is certain.” Those two concepts are unrelated and yet somehow equally terrifying. You’d think the rational thing to do would be to sit next to a stranger, brandish our fists in the air, and yawp at our fateful conundrum. Instead, if we’re daring, we might politely comment on the weather. The weather is partly linked to that thing I mentioned earlier about big celestial balls courting each other in space. Aren’t I a reliable narrator?
Sometimes I feel like I should say something back. I convince myself that my eyes, in turn, would do the heavy lifting for me. The truth is that neither of us has a clue. Besides, what would they say? I’ve always wondered that. I guess they’d say, “I’m tired, too.” But even that would seem undignified. Instead I say, “here’s my big blue bag of dirty laundry.”