Banana skins, important documents and nocturnal outbursts

On a daily basis, at approximately the same time, prior to my chamomile tea with melatonin, I am forcefully reminded of my domestic duties by the goddess of rubbish. The goddess of rubbish seeks to drive me mad; she arrives and whispers terrible things in my ear about everything that, at that precise moment late in the evening, is in the house and should instead be in the bin, or rather in the tip, or rather in hell. These are items I should discard but which instead remain, gradually overwhelming me. She is a potent, malevolent entity: on certain evenings she pushes me toward my children’s rooms, insisting that there are mountains of material to be eliminated, and whispering, ‘Look, they’ll never notice,’ and ‘Just think how lovely it’ll be afterwards, how free you’ll feel.’ I resist and drink plenty of chamomile tea with melatonin. Sometimes, though, this goddess – with blonde hair made of countless upside-down banana skins – makes me realise she’d be happy with any old haul: just the milk in the fridge that’s just gone off, a few truly unreadable books (but I resist), a hideous container that turned up in the kitchen by who knows what means, the rubber bands the cats play with, all those receipts that no one will ever check, but whilst we’re at it, a pair of jeans too that I must have bought in a hallucinatory, body-dysmorphic moment – there’s no other explanation. The goddess of rubbish is truly stubborn, capable of ruining the ending of a film for me, capable of putting me in a bad mood for the whole evening with the thought of these objects that take up more and more space, that suffocate me and that undoubtedly detest me because I don’t love them and can’t find the right places for them, I don’t know how to thank them, after all, I am no Marie Kondo; all I can do is glance at them out of the corner of my eye and sigh with disgust and dissatisfaction. If the goddess of rubbish does not feel sufficiently indulged, she can push me to the perilous brink of a fit of rage. This fit is a sort of spell from which I wake up with no memory whatsoever, but with the rubbish bin (sorted but never quite enough) completely overflowing.

On Sunday morning I woke up with a peculiar buzz in my head and proceeded directly to the computer desk (which is actually the dining table, so the computer often ends up covered in other objects that really have no business being there: apples, bananas, lighters, vitamin C, other books). I was certain I had left a very important envelope next to the computer, addressed to me, containing an original document I had obtained only after a Kafkaesque process. Throughout the previous day I had repeatedly told myself: ‘I’ll put the envelope here, so I don’t lose it.’ Then, darkness. The envelope had vanished, and on that Sunday morning I had just enough time to accuse everyone of having stolen it, of having moved it, of wanting to sabotage me. No one knew what I was talking about, but they were all suspects, all guilty of immense disorder. “You mustn’t touch my things!” I shouted, rushing back and forth across the house in despair. Then I spotted a banana peel on the table and realised what had happened. I ran into the kitchen and rummaged through the bin on my knees. Alongside book wrappers, receipts, newspaper clippings, sweet wrappers and packets of flea treatment, there was the envelope – rather tattered but still intact – with my ID inside. I had thrown it away in a fit of rage. The goddess of rubbish, meanwhile, was laughing at me. I grabbed her by the hair and chucked her into the organic waste bin.