The Unrecycled Life

On the day I realized my marriage of 16 years was over, I stopped recycling. The plastic Diet Coke bottles, yesterday’s Boston Globe, GQ magazines, the Campbell’s tomato soup cans — they all were tossed into a single large opaque-green plastic bag. I felt a twinge of guilt when I threw it into the dumpster at my town’s landfill under the suspicious eye of the Public Works Department employee, but it was so freeing to put it all in a bag and let it go — plunk — in with all the other trash. Of course, I was at risk of incurring fines, because recycling is mandatory in my hometown. I was able to get away with it, though. Living suddenly alone, I generated less trash and ate in my car, buying chicken wraps at McDonald’s and Diet Cokes. That trash I could toss when I topped off my tank at the gas station in those dark receptacles with the removable top with the small holes that attempt to limit the volume of your refuse. I would jam it through the hole or quickly take off the top and drop the bag in. More frequently, on my way home from Boston, I would pull into the McDonald’s on Route 1 in Saugus and order another divorcingman’s meal of two chicken wraps ("with chipotle sauce, please") and a Diet Coke. After I had paid at the first window and picked up my food at the second, I would gather up the wrappers and cup from the night before and throw the trash into the mouth of the reptilian-like red plastic receptacle conveniently placed now along the driver’s side of your car as you exit McDonald’s. Fast food meets fast trash.

Months into my divorce, which rapidly grew messy and ugly with lawyers and child custody and financial issues, I started using those opaque tan or white plastic bags from the grocery store to collect my trash from the evening meal (paper plates, plastic cups, a couple of paper towels, leftover rice, chicken bones). I’d hang it on the pantry door in my empty, child-less house and fill it up. If I chewed a piece of gum, it would go in there. If I blew my nose in Kleenex, I’d toss it there. A pen lacking ink, boom, in the bag. I was careful not to discard any letters or mail in there, because household trash disposal at gas stations and elsewhere is frowned upon and some unlucky schmuck will pick through what looks to be illegally tossed trash in a search for clues, like an old cable TV bill bearing the perpetrator's telltale address. I have heard you typically get a letter of warning, but I never got one because I was careful. All the mail and envelopes that I didn’t need would go into my Vermont Castings Resolute woodstove. I would use a wooden match to light the paper  — watching with an uneasy delight as the flame licked and crawled across the pyre, my name and address burning from orange to blue to brown to black, destroying and consuming everything in its path. It gave me the feeling of finality and obliteration that blazed all around me.