the things we leave behind.

Walking to the Irving Park Blue Line station from my house on the way to Bucktown, a companion and I stopped in an alley where a dumpster sat filled with what looked like the remains of someone's life. There were toiletries, a broken box fan, chairs, tables, breakfast trays, the contents of a refrigerator, a bed and mattress and stacks and piles of paper and styrofoam. We snooped. There seemed to be nothing worth taking. The furniture was of a style you would find in a free clinic, ugly and worth nothing. Everything else was just garbage. Then My friend opened a recycling bin.

"Look at this," she said, and pulled out a book titled "Exploring the Human Aura."

I exclaimed something, this find being my dream, and rushed over greedily searching through the bin that was chock full of similarly titled books. We stood pulling out one after the other, creating a pile of keepers at our feet, not thinking of how we were going to carry all of them on public transportation. 

This problem came to light.

We sat in the alley by the bin looking through them, selecting the best ones, the ones that could not be left behind. 

"Exploring the Human Aura"

by

Nicholas M. Regush

in collaboration with

Jan Merta

"Leaving the Body"

by

D. Scott Rogo

"Amazing Secrets of the Mystic East"

by

Norvell

"The Secret of Spirit-Thought Magic"

by

Frank R. Young

We crammed these into my book bag, that was already full of books. We dove into these while we waited for the train to come. 

"Do you think they died?"

"Who?"

"Whoever's books these were,"

"Oh," I said. It seemed plausible. Why else would they be there, along with everything else that had been thrown out. Someone must have cleared out their apartment. 

"Look at this," said my friend, and showed me the title of a chapter in "The Secret of Spirit-Thought Magic": How to Apply Spirit-Thought to Capture and Rule the Person You Want Romantically.

"They must have been lonely," she said.

"Yeah."

The books had that musty and sweet smell of age (and possibly garbage). It made me think of my grandfather and the books he left me when he died. The novel he left unfinished. How I had looked up to him and sought to become him. There can only be so much achieved through life. I wonder if in the end we are left to decide what to keep and what to leave behind.