Meditation on plastic. // Morning sun brightens bare arms, damp grass touches feet, my body aches as I stoop to the ground. No need to move, so much of it is here. I pick it up piece by piece and pin it together between fingers of one hand. I pry fragments of discard from the dirt, from a multifarious mosaic of the formerly-purposed. I find they have become embedded, as finding rest in, as being eaten by organic matter. It breaks into smaller pieces, as by accident, by the pull of my fingers, or the same sacred falling apart as us all. Trying, as nature, to lose itself, disintegrating into soil. The closer one looks, the dirtier one’s fingernails, the more scattered becomes the plastic. One fills bags and it doesn’t disappear. Vegetation grows over it in carpets and thickets. The baby chickens are digging through it, strings of blue grass and black cord, eating it, styrofoam pecked into tiny crumbles like bread, swallowed into newborn bodies. It disappears into living things with unknown effect. The compost feeds the children. The junk food, the barbie dreamhouse food that it wrapped, the beverage it carried, an unending supply of single servings, in reflective colors and flavors of distraction, the defunct dreams play before my inner eye as I untangle it from grass and root, the tarpaulin or the twine that fell apart, the filters on countless cigarettes. This one was held between someone’s lips. It was dropped, tossed, thrown, flung, strung out, put, left, dumped, piled up, ground in, tamped down. Without intention, again and again, as if by second nature, and the being of plastic is to be shaped into anything and never decay, to be infinite and undying, impervious to rot. (I fill a plastic bag with the plastic, and put it in a plastic garbage bin, for going to “the dump”.)
Plastic is hope. Plastic is death. Plastic is certain. I refill my glass at the plastic dispenser. My fingers tap the plastic-coated keys. A piece of plastic releases drugs into my body. I am the destiny of plastic, sorting through its own ephemera. As time slips into plastic time. (As destiny does. Which probably seems like a lot, to you, but) to us, we last less than a day.