the forgotten things
By Alina Nic
Dear noticer,
Allow me to tell you a story. The sun sets through the windows of a full classroom, and many noises are heard all at once. Students thanking the professor. Bustling conversations of how their evening will be spent. Laptops closing. Bags opening. Bags closing. The shuffling of winter coats, scarves, gloves all being adorned in a mindless manner as they sprint for the door. Dings of elevators. Doors shutting. Footsteps leaving. Voices fading.
The moon rises through the windows of a classroom that is no longer full. And one that isn’t empty. Scattered along the light brown tables, fallen to the floors of a rough blue carpet, and spilled across the black chairs, there remains a presence. A forgettable presence. Things that cost money to obtain, but cost nothing to leave behind. A brown paper bag; empty, of course. An empty bottle of water. Two or three coffee cups, drained of their content. One or two slightly spilled. A Coke can. More napkins than I am capable of counting on short notice. Crumbs. Bread crumbs. Sandwich crumbs. Cookie crumbs.
Some of these forgotten contents are not empty. A bag of cookies with just one more cookie. A half-eaten sandwich. Left until it begins to stench, rotting and falling away from its original form. Their entire nature is to be abandoned. They are all bought hastily; a quick snack or coffee to munch on during a three-hour class spent browsing the internet for a new pair of shoes. Something to stay awake through the endless reading of Whatsapp messages. They mean nothing to them, and so when they are drained of use, they are left behind. So goes everything in their lives. When it is useful, it is kept. What makes a thing useful? What makes it worthy of being picked up? What makes it worthy of being used, rather than left to rot on its own?
Just outside the classroom lies a proper resting place. A beautiful blue bin, neatly arranged and written with various categories for the things to go in. A chance. An opportunity for the things to be reborn, shaped into something else useful. A moment for the air to breathe and the Earth to pause, knowing that things will be carried onto their next life. And yet, the faceless things rarely find themselves resting in such a beautiful recycling bin.
They add to it everyday. Everything forgotten. Every brown paper bag. Every half-eaten chicken sandwich. Every spilled and sticky soda can. Every nearly-empty coffee cup. Every paper straw. Every water bottle made of recyclable plastic. And this is a collection of things that should worry you. For when the sun goes low, and the lights are turned off for the evening, it is not a student who picks up such things. The Forgotten becomes.
The sound is abysmal, almost not even there. It is a drag. A scraping. It is a tail of brown napkins. It is strong claws of crushed and torn aluminum, covered in dripping liquids. It is long arms of spindly, stretched plastic. It is molded fruit, rapidly spreading through its own comfortable environment of rotting food. It is a million paper straws woven together over a body. It is a face. Eyes and a mouth and a nose, struggling to breath in a world determined to choke it out. It is the Forgotten Things.
They become. And this one being, roams the halls of an empty school, devoid of all presence except for its own. It picks up all that which has been left behind until the sun rises once more. And these things, they never truly go away. Even in the light of day, you can see them. You can see me.
And yet, no one ever does. I lean over their heads. I brush past their shoulders. I breathe down their neck, inhaling their putrid perfumes and scents. But those who forget the things, those who are blind to those which do not matter to them, will never see me. Their view of the world is simply different from the empathetic.
Everyday there are more and more things to pick up, and I notice myself growing larger and larger. I grow angrier and angrier at their willful ignorance, their blatant and forgetful stupidity. The longer my claws get, the larger my tail grows, the more I desire their end.
I watch them pack their bags. I watch them laugh and shout and do every action possible, except for picking up the Forgotten Things. It becomes clear to me that it is not only the cost of things that does not matter to them, but also, the value. I notice they leave everything. Nowhere is empty. Study rooms are occupied by abandoned jackets, laptops, bags. As far as I’m concerned, they are now Forgotten Things. And so they become. I absorb them just as I absorb the nearly-empty coffee cups that they also leave behind. Careless. Reckless. I struggle to breath. Everything is abandoned.
They must have value. Something must have value, anything. But can one value something? Can one value themselves? Their friends? Their family? Clearly not. Value, respect, acknowledgement of a world around them that matters outside of their own concerns? What does it even mean, to be of value? Is it a thing’s usefulness? But then surely, the things left behind have some usefulness left in them. They could have been transformed. They could have been so much more. I could have been so much more. I am choking.
Sometimes they get angry, once their things have been abandoned and disappeared. But then I see them the next day, brand new objects of similar nature that they also forget as soon as their attention is slightly diverted. Even the objects that they seem to covet are soon wasted away and abandoned. Smoked away, drank away, littered. Over years of wandering, watching them repeat the same actions over and over and over again, I think I have finally decided. I think I finally know what it is that is of value to them. Nothing. Not even themselves. There is nothing that cannot be forgotten. There is nothing that can be remembered, not the way I have seen them.
That is what I will take. They will become one with the Forgotten Things. And maybe then, they will notice. I am convinced there is no other way they will learn, understand; other than through brutal disregard and disrespect, a language which they are fluent in. So, this is my message to them. There will come a day when you leave your empty coffee cup on the classroom table, running out to go buy and feed into the horde of irrelevant. You will forget these things once again. You will leave the classroom. You will never leave the school. You will not die. You have to be alive first to do that, and from what I see, you aren’t currently living. You are devoid of thought, passion, concern; as if you are a zombie disguised in an endless void of plastic.
I reason that becoming part of the Forgotten Things might be the most meaningful thing to ever happen in your life.
I often wonder what it is that has created my presence in this place. Why the Forgotten Things became forgotten, and why they have come together all at once to be a part of it. And I find myself settling on the conclusion that it must be because of the intense emotion I feel. The anger. The resentment. The desire for justice. The desire to force you all, for once in your lives, to think independently and fight for something passionate. The desire to see you act with original thought, thought free of machine, and notice the things before they become forgotten. If only you had. If only you had allowed yourself to feel such passion, and saw me before it was too late.
I am afraid. I struggle to breath. I’m choking. Beyond the doors of the classroom, beyond the reach of my claws and the drag of the ever-growing weight of my tail, there are things that I cannot reach. Forgotten Things that sit alone. I feel sorrow for them. An immense sense of loss that they will never get an afterlife, never be reborn. A fear that they will continue to grow, and eventually everything will be consumed. Everything will become a Forgotten Thing. You, too.
At the end of time, when we are all Forgotten Things, there is no hidden message. No lesson to learn. No magical concept out of reach of the human perception of the Earth. Other than one very, exceedingly, extremely, remarkably simple concept: pick up your trash.
Sincerely,
The Forgotten Things