The girl I live with is a dumpster-diver, and through her I've become one too. We've been friends for a while now, but I'm not sure exactly how long... eight years perhaps? She is tall and blond, a classic beauty with a tiny waist and old-fashioned ideas. She is from a wealthy family, and travels abroad at least once a year. She is a graduate student of chemistry, and a talented artist. She brings new definition to the term "eccentric". Everyone always said that we were a perfect match, and now we live together in a house that is growing slowly more and more full of things, insane things which we made or found or were gifted to us anonymously by friends passing by in the night.

Mostly, though, it's filling with things from dumpsters.

I know that over time people have begun thinking of us differently. We are building our future out of the things we bring home, a future made out of pieces of other people's pasts. Each dumpster contains an entire story; a bankrupt church with old choir robes, conference tables and a broken organ, or the former crack house with filthy clothes and unsalvageable, vomit-stained furniture. There are some dumpsters that you know, before climbing up and peeking over the edge, that you would need a hazmat suit to climb into.

Some dumpsters tell you, in fragments night after night, about the person whose life is being emptied box by box into it, for portage to the landfill. The mildewed makeshift endtable at first tells of poverty, but soon boxes of toiletries start to tell a story of thriftiness, of always being prepared for the future. An entire case of shampoo; four boxes of Irish Spring. Thousands of tampons. She was a hoarder, the former owner of what is now trash. We guess from her hats and the brightness of her costume jewelry that she was black, and from the beautiful coat with a fur collar that she was imposing in stature. There are no religious mementos... perhaps she was an atheist, or simply not a churchgoer. Perhaps those things were given away to family. In the dozens of romance novels, we find a name written in the front cover. These things come to live with us.

In the neighborhood, we unfold our story as we go out night after night and retrieve pieces of other stories, bring them home to hoard in our history. We can see ourselves growing old, doing this; we can see the overwhelmed look on the faces of the executors of our estate as they say "What are we going to do with all this junk? Should we just get a dumpster?" Those old ladies that lived in that house... the neighbors say they used to go out at night and scavenge through the trash. Their house is full of junk, of strange things rescued from the dump. They always seemed normal enough when you talked to them, but you could see them bringing things home all the time...

Tonight we're visiting the dumpster of a lonely old man who lived on 13th. He was really into Westerns, and his Chinese pornography collection is amazing.