Don’t you want to move on? Shed some baggage and leave? I do. I’ve been trying all my adult life. Trying to sort shit out so that I can get the fuck out of here. For good. Surely it can’t be that hard. Some people just get up and go. Leaving all the crap they don’t need for someone else to deal with. They don’t give a shit. Good for them. They’ve got the right idea. If you want to grab anything for yourself in this stupid life, that’s what you’ve got to do. Have the nerve for a bit of productive selfishness.

But I can’t let myself leave a single trace. I’m either goody-two-shoes, or just incredibly paranoid. Or both. Maybe they’re just the same thing. At any rate, I can’t leave anything behind that someone might get hold of. They might use it to keep hold of me. And I don’t want anyone to hold me anymore. Because I don’t want to be held back. So everything’s got to be used up. Reduced to its most decimated, dehydrated, deconstructed state. Preferably turned to dust. Food, clothes, plastic bags, old appliances, papers. Especially papers. It’s all got be finished with. Over. I want it all to be over.

But the shredder broke.

Of course, I should have just bought a new one. If I’d just bought a new shredder I could have carried on shredding and by now I’d be done and dusted and up and out of here. But if I’d bought a new shredder, what would I have done with the old one? Leave it for someone else to deal with? Of course not. That would be self-defeating. I simply couldn’t buy a new shredder. But as a result, I couldn’t shred anymore. And since I couldn’t shred, the paper couldn’t be reduced sufficiently to be considered dealt with. So I couldn’t leave.

Lacking the go ahead for chucking all that paper in the trash, I chucked it in the next best thing. Into the massive trash can that’s art. Because sometimes art’s just a game played with all the crap you didn’t have the guts to throw away. A place for biding time to avoid spending time with your own cowardice. An excuse for not have managed to move on. A sad lingering. Neither the embarrassment you’re trying to escape, nor the liberation you’re hoping to escape to. A failure. Which sometimes goes by the name “beauty.”