Bag.

On Monday, the ritual begins, when the calendar yawns and the neighbor is already parking his containers in military formation on the sidewalk. I roll up my sleeves, unravel the knots in my soul, and pull the garbage bag from its plastic cradle. He sputters, this clumsy baby of black polyethylene—sleepy from coffee grounds, banana peels, and the forgotten shell sand of a wind-blown Sunday. I whisper commands to him. Sit. Stay. Don't leak. Then the exercises begin: waddling on the tile joints, the strings taut like shoelaces, the mouth closed like a secret. Go on, I say, the street awaits, the week awaits, the eternal carriage awaits.

The sidewalk is an arena. There, bag and gravity pit their mettle. Above us, the wind sings, below, the wet from a previous shower hisses. I guide him in slalom steps past the bicycles, past the post with the wobbly "PMD" sticker. A cat follows us—judge of stench and failure. The bag sways, its shadow hiccups. I praise him for every half meter, like a trainer who's seen too many documentaries about heroism. Yet it feels pointless—as if I'm teaching a mythical beast how to die every week. For that is my student's fate: disappearing behind the curtains of a mouth full of knives and brushes, until only an echo of cardboard and orange peel remains.

And yet hope, cowardly and sticky, arises when I set him down. Perhaps someday a diploma will follow—ribbon, stamp, QR code—and he can leave on his own, bare-knuckle, with the lopsided luck of a grocery bag. Perhaps he'll call the neighbor, greet him politely, ask if there are any apple cores for the journey. Then I could go back to bed, to a life without waste pedagogy, where I no longer have to count my own steps to the rhythm of the garbage collection service. But no: at the end of the afternoon, the street returns to sober concrete, leaving only a faint ring of moisture—the halo of labor no one recognizes. The cat nods as if it knew.

So we toil on, the bag and I, two tragicomic pilgrims in the congregation's liturgical book. Every week the same framing verse, the same choreography of lifting and letting go, of hoping and succumbing. Perhaps this is true maturity—not buying anti-limescale or choosing a mortgage, but practicing goodbyes with something that never thanks. Tomorrow is Tuesday. Then the wagon will swoop like a greedy whale on its prey, and my student will slide in, rustle a little, and be a thing of the past. I'll wash my hands, check the air, and prepare a new creaking cradle. The calendar yawns again; the training can begin again, and I bow to the audience that doesn't come.