52. "Auxiliary Document 18"

The following was sourced from another blog right here on Blogger. In the early 2000s, a man named Frank Ruggles worked at a garbage dump in Fairfax County, Virginia, where refuse from the District of Columbia would be transported. Taking note of the strange things people threw away, in 2004 he started a blog at .com, in an effort to document the interesting things he came across in the junkyard. The blog only had three entries; the first was an introduction of himself and a summary of his work, and the last was a writeup about a washing machine seemingly flooded with chocolate pudding. Ruggles could not be contacted for comment, though our team imagines that due to a low hit count (all posts still at fewer than 100 views), Ruggles quickly abandoned the project. This team knows the feeling.

The below is from the second of the three posts, the first proper documentation of an item Ruggles had found. As he explains in his blog, Ruggles theorizes that it may have been thrown away by accident. He could find no information on the author, though he did find that the last line was borrowed and modified from another poem (the name of which he cannot remember, as with the name of that poet, and does not want to be reminded, saying he wishes to remember by himself); he notes that this leads him to believe the writer was an amateur, but he still expresses that the piece was a better work of art than anything he could create. Ruggles did not know how long it had been in the dump, observing that (adding to his belief that the piece of paper was not meant to be discarded) the work had been laminated.

You Cannot Stay Here

You cannot stay here
I cannot be selfish
We cannot know each other

You cannot stay here
You are so much greater than this place
The place where you belong
Has so much more to offer you
To make you the person
You are meant to become

I cannot be selfish
This world needs you
And I cannot withhold you from it
Here I cannot give you all that you deserve
Here I cannot make you all that you deserve to be
There they will give you milk to drink
And honey and berries to eat
They will teach you what I cannot teach you
And they will shower you in gifts I cannot provide
They will give you everything that I cannot give you
They will show you love in ways I cannot show you
I have seen where you have come from
And I see now where you must go
And though I wish you could stay here
You will be better there
Safer there
Happier there than with me

We cannot know each other
To be the great person this world needs
You cannot be tainted by me
I must be a stranger to you
So I cannot hold you back
You must never meet me
Because I would love you
And it would not be fair to him
That he should not
If you cannot be his
You must not be mine
And I must never love you
For I would show you enough love
To break your heart forever

MVS
3 February 1999