Strawberries and Plastic Bags

It's my last day in America. In Albertson's, the checker double-bags my glossy-coated strawberries. I take them out and put them in my own satchel, the one I've owned since I lived in France, where the strawberries have a matte finish: a dull, earthy look, and they smell like dirt. The taste of those sweet European polyps of purity, oh the taste is so much sweeter than the artificialized nectar of my corner-store youth. Those fraises fraiches were not sprayed with pesticides, injected with hormones, bred to be redder than reality, imbued with flavor-enhancers to stimulate a reaction scientifically conspired to create a carbon-copy experience of enjoyment, indistinguishable to the untrained or overly MSG'ed bud, unrecognizable to us Americans. No, those strawberries exist only seasonally, and in a different world.

I tell the checker I do not need the bags, innocently assuming she'll re-use them for the next purchaser of plastic packaging and neon-lit screamin' deals.

She does not.

She wads the two bags, unused but for a moment of her indiscriminate haste to move me through the line, and throws them in the trash. They will not be used to transport goods from one place to the next. They will instead be transported themselves, useless, via plastic trashbag to transfer site, to a waste-management facility, where men move mountains of trash, to make room for the refuse of the next person in line.

It saddens me, this world.

It is time for a great change. If my body lies victim to the upheaval, then so be my demise. I shall be buried and uplifted and unified amongst the dirt and stones and plastic bags, an element of the origination of what is to come. Perhaps my bones will birth a coniferous forest. Perhaps I will fly away on the breath of a fairy, or some similar insect without such a mystical epithet.

Yet I cling to this carbon-based, waste-making machine, this body of mine. The human experience has been too beautiful, too sensuous, too awesome to abandon.

For two weeks I've been among my most favorite people of this earth. These are the ones who inspire me to create, to continue, to share and to love. And love indeed I do; a man from a past life has re-entered my consciousness, my present tense. I hope he's the one with whom I witness the rebirth of this world. I see him for the first time in a decade in three days.

My stomach is a-flutter; I'm so excited I'm sweaty and scared and these strawberries are giving me heartburn to boot; nothing has changed. Everything changes all of the time.