Plastic Bag Days
Plastic Bag Days
by Noreen Ocampo
Sticky Notes is a column by Noreen Ocampo, who very much wants to say: Hi, welcome back to my channel! While I can’t provide perfectly cinematic color-grading or lofi beats in the background, I’d like to offer you an amalgamation of the happier dust collecting in my notes app. This column is an attempt at practicing gratitude, learning optimism, and formally asking the universe to allow me at least one nice thought to share with you all each month. And since I am a writer (but unfortunately not also a Youtuber), I’m sure there will be some literary discussion along the way. Let’s get started.
I spent New Year’s Day cleaning. In other words, I half-made my bed and considered remembering the laundry. I deleted the pictures I had already deleted before but had recovered out of a particular weakness for nostalgia. I set aside the clothes that would never fit me, emptied a vase that had held the same bouquet for far too long, and spent the rest of the afternoon reading old cards.
I got stuck somewhere between the clothes and the vase and the cards, the momentum of letting go draining away when I let myself remember. There were some things I ultimately tucked away but still held on to — perhaps not out of weakness but softness, if you can agree with me that there’s a difference.
A friend I love dearly recently told me to think about ways to remind myself of the people in my life. I had just confessed to feeling see-through, like an evil plastic bag on a turbulent day, and the obvious response, of course, would have been to recommend reaching out to all the friends whose messages were much like my laundry: important, never forgotten, but set aside.
How lucky I am to correspond with people with such good taste in stamps. Hello to Anne Spencer and the frog.
But she, being used to my kinship with plastic bags and chronic inability to text back, suggested letter writing. Writing letters, she explained, addresses both sides of the reminder we need on plastic bag days: we have people we care about enough to sit down and write to, and these people care enough about us to receive and read our letters — all without the pressure for either party to conjure an immediate response, which leaves breathing room for the unpredictable rhythm of life. This is an answer that makes more sense to me.
Prior to this conversation, I had actually already dabbled a bit in letter writing. And despite the uncontrollable decline of my handwriting, which is really catching up with me now, I am comforted by the new yet familiar process of scavenging for acceptable stationery, asking my parents to pick up stamps at the store, and decorating envelopes with washi tape I have been stockpiling since high school.
When I sit at the too-small desk I am borrowing from my mother during this online semester, writing letters is one of the only things that urges me to embrace a thoughtful slowness that I can’t achieve even when scrutinizing my poetry or playing Animal Crossing. In this beginning stage of my friendship with slowness, too, I appreciate how it allows me to leisurely scribble hellos, life updates, and questions that feel like my most unpolished writing but most authentic thought.
From Charles Baudelaire’s “The Voyage” :
“But the real travelers are those who leave for leaving’s sake; their hearts are light as balloons, they never diverge from the path of their fate and, without knowing why, always say, ‘Let’s go.’”
My letters travel cross-country to California, most often, to new friends with whom I hope to someday have the chance to laugh without the two thousand mile distance and time difference. More recently, my letters also circulate within Georgia, reconnecting me to friends from university who I am counting down the days until I get to see again. Amidst what sometimes feels like a hopeless stalemate of me circling my bedroom again and again, my letters, at least, can go out and remind people that they mean something to me.
In preparation for the upcoming holiday, I am making Valentine’s cards for these friends now. They are only humble little offerings of postcards and my shaky penmanship attempting its best, but when I think back to my friend’s words about the grounding reminder that a letter can provide, each card begins to feel more significant and will hopefully be something that its recipient will pocket and smile about.
Spoiler: these flowers made me cry. Kissing the homies good night for real.
In truth, I kept all of those cards I had pored over on New Year’s Day, swayed by the magnetic capacity of physical things to store so much sentiment that a permanent letting go feels near-impossible. If a picture is worth a thousand words, I think the words themselves are still worth more. As much as I love both an in-the-moment snapshot and a meticulously composed photo, I visualize the slowing down necessary to understand what we feel, the physical process of writing it out, and the trip to the mailbox that involves a goodbye in order to say hello — and I know that for me, at least, the words mean more. So I keep them, even those old ones that are a tinge bittersweet now.
But it would be a lie to say that the bitter washes out all the sweet. My collection of pen pal letters grows and grows, and soon I’ll have to replace its current location, wedged between unread books on my bookshelf. My vase, too, didn’t stay empty for long; my two best friends not only sent me a new bouquet to replace the old one but handpicked every flower and centered the bright yellow that I gravitate to these days.
And throughout all of this, I am beginning to understand that I am not a plastic bag at all — if I must be, I am one that loves and is loved, one worth writing to and hearing from.
for Rukmini, who embraces my plastic-bagness; Ate Keana, who was my first pen pal; and Joanna and Sharon, whose flowers I will keep forever
Noreen Ocampo is a Filipina American writer and poet from metro Atlanta. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Taco Bell Quarterly, Hobart, and HAD, among others, and she was also a music fellow in the 2019 COUNTERCLOCK Arts Collective. She studies English, film, and media at Emory University.