Instead of immediately falling asleep, she looked out the window at the broken-down RV that Darren had turned into his garrison. Whatever light source he was using cast just enough glow for her to see the chaos of clutter among which he lived his life: piles upon piles of items he had found and brought back here. For Darren, these things had become a safety signal, a way to buffer himself against the soreness of his own vulnerability. It was a life’s worth of people who were so inconsistent, unreliable and impermanent that they could only be counted on to use and take things from him that had made him this way. It was safer for him now to attach to things rather than people. It was the only way to predict and control his life. It was the only way to feel good.

Darren could look at anything and imagine a potential time when he might need it. The piles were the closest he could get to closeness. They felt cozy to him. The physical distance between objects, which is created when people organize things, felt cold and isolated to him. He didn’t want that separation. That organized separation between objects reopened the wound of emptiness and isolation. Besides that, Darren hated space. For Darren, space meant exposure, where attack could come from anywhere at any moment. Having clutter around him offered him enclosure and padding from potential threat.

When Darren had returned from war, he began to identify with trash. There was a day before he ended up out on the streets where he was about to throw away a milk carton and suddenly he saw himself in that milk carton. It was suddenly something that he had used and was about to throw away the same way that the army had used him up and thrown him away. He couldn’t stand it. So he washed it out and filled it with soil to use it as a pot for a dandelion he dug up from the lawn outside the house. Seeing the value in anything and everything was the best way he could find to resolve the wound of being treated as if he no longer had any value and of being used and discarded himself.