Dead men with no smell, since then I have seen them often. Bodies lining the streets, obscuring paths and disfiguring the landscape, made to serve degradation. A fate devoid of life’s dignity, yet a destiny worse than death as it holds no deserved respite.

And just as it took the time to weave me into its story did it rapidly rip from me to leave an ugly, forced void that needed to be filled precisely at this moment.

The Body has decomposed.

Reduced to a lump within a trash bag now quietly waiting to be handled. Laid on the surface of the ground it is presented as waste. The space it once occupied proudly, now borrowed from every irritated passersby annoyed by the obstacle beneath their feet.

Once It was a person remembered as it lived, but no longer, not after it had rotten, confronted with decay, those remaining find comfort in the embrace of memory. Judging it as such, trash is left to wither and be regarded as nothing more but something as long since passed.

Along with the discarded, a used paint bucket sits by its side like a perfect companion, giving it that picture-perfect look of a trash heap. Enticing me all this time, why only now does it so easily fit into that old container like trash? Why after all those imposing moments does it fall into that description so easily? It felt like somebody was behind this; someone put this bucket here to make it trash.

Accepting that one finds awareness only where he looks for meaning, what role did I play in its fate? One to be filled as a factor or discarded as an observer. Regardless of the choice, it is a role nonetheless.

I was to be a factor in its Salvation, a force to stand by it and be at least more meaningful than its now defining bucket.

But being here as the lights dim and the curtain slowly starts to close on my role in the spotlight; letting its fate come true as a conclusion of this closing Act, it makes me only an observer and an instrument of the disregarded.

A life stained with nothing much but cautionary tales and failures is what I take as a concluding lesson on this journey long after the curtain has dropped.

May the Next one to see the Filth be more than I was. May he learn from it and use it as a catalyst to push forward into substance rather than loss when this productions eventual renews. May he realize that sometime soon after this, the bucket will be moved once again and plan accordingly for the occasion.

At that point, it will stand atop the trash pile signaling its place that much clearer, like a monarch atop its rightful throne. Devaluing it even further.

May he deduce that someone is doing this on purpose, making this scene a very literal: heap of trash.

If we must have one thing in common, may he learn from my mistakes and in time forget and trample over all who I ever was. To trust in himself and feel pity for the man slumbering here in a nightmare of spiraling decay; for at that moment, we will no longer share anything in common.