I bought her a box of gold-colored trash bags.
She was a hooker who called herself a “golden trash bag” with no compunctions or reserve. She was in her mid 20s and had been stripping and escorting since she was 17. She aspired to be the old lady of the dance floor, and looked forward to a long career making her money both in the bedrooms and on the catwalk.
I was briefly smitten, mostly because she seemed interested in me, and (honestly) because I briefly assumed she’d be easy. On one occasion I thought we might hook up but it never happened. She was a sweetheart but I honestly had no meaningful designs on her. Our mutual interest might have lasted about 10 minutes, occurring in non-consecutive periods of one or two minutes over several weeks.
We were not friends long enough for me to ever present her with the golden trash bags. At a point where I imagined our connection was meaningful enough that it would endure I gift-wrapped the bags and saved them in a closet. Until yesterday. Decluttering has begun and in that muse it made sense to rid my space of trash bags I bought several years ago for a woman I barely knew.
I never solicited her services or saw her dance, save for sanitized excerpts of her performances online. She dabbled in other arts. Singing (awful). Writing (so-so). Painting (awful).
Yesterday I unwrapped the erstwhile gift of the golden trash bags, intending to dump them, before deciding that I could actually use these bags in my decluttering tasks. In fact, they are just what I was looking for with respect to the new composting mandate. Throwing chicken bones and pork chop entrails straight into the compost bin seems like a maggot-fest that will also attract angry flies and swarms of other tasties. I will use these bags for compost detail.
So instead of what I had imagined to be a thoughtful, poignant gift for a woman who called herself a golden trash bag, I will instead stuff her bags with pork chop bones, lime peels, and mostly-eaten cheeseburgers. She will never know, and I will never forget.