Lint: A Review

It’s an interesting task I proposed, I’ll admit, but I’ve found in life, that once you agree to do something, you have to go the whole way, no half assing it.  And so now I’m doing this.  A host of words on this piece of belly button lint.

It’s something that seems easy, something that everyone knows, even if their mileage may vary.  Some light shreds of cotton, polyester, or whatever your clothes are made of, drawn in, resting where they’re most comfortable, in the warm embrace of your harsh chest hair and gut, like an embryo in practically no ways whatsoever.  You go to change, to shower, to collapse into bed, and you notice something in your peripheries.  This dark ball of fuzz, so you reach down, pluck it out, cringe a little at the disgusting thing you face, and you abandon it like Frollo attempted to do with Quasimodo.  That is to say, down a well.  But think, this is part of you, it has grown from you, this isn’t something you should ignore.  This is something beautiful.

The light shines through it, from a distance.  An ethereal transparency, that transcends description.  It produces a glow that is almost halo like in beauty and power.  Moving closer, a wealth of threads become visible.  Like the invisible threads that hold us all together they intertwine and intermingle, like a Redneck Christmas party.  I try to follow any one thread, but I lose it, I spy another, but it too disappears.  To think of this as a bunch of strings too simple.  It is a living organism, sentient and amazing, like a Jellyfish, except that it won’t sting you, and doesn’t live in the ocean.

I stare at the whole thing.  It’s dark, but not as dark as I’d expect, given my penchant for black clothes.  There’s a streak of colour, a deep blue, normally melancholy, yet strangely uplifting compared to the grey that surrounds it.  Like the light at the end of a tunnel, it speaks of hope, and of the future.  It knows where it is, and what it is, and it doesn’t care.  It only wants to move you, to touch you, like your uncle Larry after a few too many beers.  There’s a hint of brown there, just a tiny speck, swamped by the foreign bodies around it, the black kid in a troubled texan school.  It speaks not of hope, it cares not for dignity, it cares only for survival, to make it through.  Maybe in the future it will find some people who are more like it, in creed or colour.  It might find a nice girl, and settle down.  Eventually the nightmares of its past will fade, years spent visiting a stuffy man in a stuffy room can be thanked for that.  But deep down, at the back of its mind, it will always wonder what it did wrong.  Whether maybe, just maybe, everyone else there was right.

I pick the lint up, throw it into the air.  It floats slowly down, a leaf on the wind, buffeted by minute breezes, and micro climates.  It hovers for a second above my hand, a last ditch attempt to escape, like a hooker nailed to a washboard as the hammer comes striking down.  It resigns itself to its fate and lands.  If anything it seems even more beautiful than before.  Absence makes the heart fonder, and all that.  I know now that it can’t leave.  I must have it forever.  Nobody else could understand the beauty here.  I find the evidence of my past discreptions, my impurities.  They won’t do, that I know.  I burn them, a silent effigy to their successor.  They stare at me as they burn.  Their beautiful past behind them, age has twisted them beyond recognition, more so than the fire ever could.  They should feel relief, they should thank me.  I am doing this for them, not for me.

I hold the most important piece, I cup it in both of my hands.  I breathe in its scent.  A whiff of myself in it, mingling with the scent of clothes, the air outside.  A faint memory of a girl I used to know.  It evokes her, now I see.

This is why it must remain.  This is why I need it.  For her.  The one who I allowed to walk away.

You can never leave me lint.  Never.