lockers ovenbird At the end of the tenth grade I got a summer_job at my high_school. My first task was to empty abandoned lockers. Everyone was supposed to take their lock off at the end of the year and clear out their belongings. But some people didn’t bother, which meant the school was peppered with locked cavities that might have ANYTHING inside. This activity appealed to the part of me that dreamed of being an anthropologist. Here was a chance to sift through the detritus of my peer’s lives, digging through layers of cultural artifacts in the hope of gaining a better understanding of the people I begrudgingly shared my days with. I didn’t expect any of them to make an attempt to understand me, but here I had a chance to gain insight into their own lives and motivations. I was equipped with a device that told me all the secret passwords I needed. I could enter the serial number on the back of each lock and the machine would spit out the combination. I had garbage bags and rubber gloves, which turned out to be essential. No one oversaw my work. I was meant to throw out every last thing I found without question, unless the object was the property of the school. I spent a number of days alone in the empty hallways breaking into the lockers, encountering the filth and disregard of those who lacked the respect to empty them. I found rotting food, binders full of notes and poorly done homework, broken pencils and leaking pens, textbooks that weren’t turned in after exams, library books, photographs, magnetic mirrors, rancid gym clothes, and mangled umbrellas. Some lockers were so stuffed with ephemera that things would fall on me when I opened them, loose leaf paper fluttering to the ground creating a vague sense of autumnal release, dried up highlighters tumbling from the shelves onto my head. I learned little that helped me to navigate life as a teenager. Nothing in those lockers showed me how to connect with the confusing array of not-quite-adults who would sit in the desks next to mine in September. I held strips of images taken in the photo booths tucked away by the mall bathrooms and scrutinized friends and lovers with arms around each other, sometimes serious, sometimes silly, smiling or with tongues sticking out, or faces mashed together in a messy kiss, and I could not insert myself into what I saw. Lives were being lived that I would never be invited to touch. I was only allowed to observe after_the_fact, with the school year over, everyone gone to have whatever adventures the summer agreed to cough up. I moved through the liminal space of each locker, inhabited for ten months and now deserted, dozens of miniature ghost towns reeking of sweat and decaying banana peels. I hauled a dozen garbage bags to the bins behind the school. When I was done I sat on the polished concrete of an echoing hall, freshly buffed by a janitor I never saw, and ate my lunch alone. This, at least, was familiar. The cool metal of the locker at my back was soothing in the summer heat. I bit into an apple and wondered if anyone would ever love_me. 260130 what's it to you? who go blather from