The chair felt like a torturer’s tool. I didn’t need to be laid on a rack to feel this kind of pain. With the oak seat pressing through my two ergonomic foam pillows as if to shake hands with my sit-bones, gravity was my enemy. How could anyone sit all day in a cubicle?
At the curb in front of my house a tiny, bent-shouldered, old Asian woman with two large sacks dangling from the ends of a long pole across her neck opened the lid of my recycling bin and began to rummage through my bottles and waste paper. I had seen her before. She wore surgical gloves and a Vietnamese farmer’s hat tied under her chin with a bright pink bow. She felt my gaze and looked up at the window. I waved. She smiled broadly and bowed her head slightly.
How did she become a waste sorter? If she had children, do they know their mother earns pennies by recycling waste? Does she remember what it was like to be warm and safe and young? When she’s scavenging up and down the concrete streets of San Francisco is her mind filled with the sounds her childhood, of birds in lush green jungles and the chatter and laughter of family as she plays nearby? Or was her whole life spent in deprivation, scrounging in a city?
I laid my head on the table in front of this laptop and sighed. It has been a long time since I was a mother cooking and cleaning and singing to my children to help them go to sleep, and longer still since I could luxuriate in the security of my loving parents’ home. I am so privileged, and yet, I’m not sure anymore why exactly I’m still here.