TL;DR

“They’re following us, you know,” she said to me one night as we were walking home from the theatre. We’d been joking and laughing; the ice slick and our giddy fear of slip-sliding down the hill or into traffic adding a nervous edge to the dialogue.

I stopped and looked around. “What do you mean? Who?” I didn’t see anyone and told her so. She gestured to a tree beside us, as though she didn’t want to speak the names of our unseen voyeurs. Hanging from a sparse limb, stripped clean by a cold and disfiguring winter, was a lone plastic bag, struggling gently against its apathetic captor. She motioned to me to keep moving and I did, a couple of long strides evening our pace. “I’ve only noticed it recently, but they seem to follow you, don’t they? You walk a couple of blocks and it could be the same bag for all you know.” She laughed like we were playing with a Ouija board at a slumber party: disbelief and uncertainty co-mingled in her stop-start cadence.

The conversation moved on to other things, these moments meant nothing to me until a little bit later. We were walking again, a few days hence; climbing one of the many staircases onto the campus. She pointed it out again. The tree directly beside us had a single plastic strip hanging from it, flapping in the wind. It reminded me, for some reason, of something else we’d talked about a little while before, about how plastic bags never decompose. If they’re spies or watchers or whatever they are, they’re perfect. Immutable, innocuous.

Walking home alone, the idea hit even harder. It was windy,  chimes from nearby houses playing their dissonant fractal songs, the air howling and whistling through every niche it was afforded. And — there it was again — another shred hanging from a tree.

Sitting here now, inside and safe, it seems absurd again, the way a basement does with the lights on or a dream the next morning when you can dismantle the inconsistencies in its irrational universe. But it comes to me every time I’m out walking. How do they move? They seem to get around silently without any notice, under the rush of cars or the idle buzz of a streetlight. Directionless, and yet effective, living off scraps of lives and experience the same way a jellyfish might sustain itself on any smaller creature unfortunate enough to drift into its drunken waltz of a path. Do they propogate? It’s probably confirmation bias, but I seem to see more of them every time I go out. There’s no pattern that I can see, I just see them more often. Like the shoes on telephone lines, which seem to multiply gradually, langorously, as the months pass.

What if, worse yet, the amount of them isn’t increasing? What if a sort of sentry is being posted on those that have, against their better judgement, fallen upon a grain of unlikely truth? Maybe there aren’t more, maybe there are just more near me. If you scratch a paranoid you find a narcissist I guess, but even the paranoid have enemies. This is the last time I trust idioms to guide me to anything interesting.

There’s no reason for them to be this disconcerting, there’s nothing to a scrap of plastic floating on the wind and hanging from a tree. The trees were infested with ravens not a month back, each looking like a living, reasoning leaf representing an overwhelming cultural collection of terrible omens. But it was transitory, they were bound to be gone in a couple of weeks.

But these things, I mean, they could persist evermore. They’ll definitely last longer than you or I and will end up being party to things we’ve never conceived of.

Look, I’m not saying that there’s anything happening.

Just keep an eye out.