The Familiar Geographies of Wishful Thoughts

Tina’s apartment is old and ill-kept. The wind blows in through cracks beneath doors and windows, and bits of plaster occasionally fall from the ceiling. She has hung an old grey parachute from her bedroom walls to catch the falling pieces, and once a week she gathers the bits and tosses them from her window into the concrete patio that is her back yard. I have told her before that she needs to find a new place to live, but the rent is low, and she says she appreciates the feeling of decay that drifts through the air of the…

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Refugee

The camera, the one Tina got on our trip to Concord the other day, is sitting on my kitchen table. She walked in the door with it ten minutes ago, and now she is drinking coffee, her bare feet propped on a chair, her hair mussed from the wind that was gusting outside my apartment before she came inside. It is barely dawn, and we haven’t turned on any lights. The dim glow from outside the kitchen windows tints us both blue, and I feel chilled by the air. “I want to go to the park today,” she says. “I…

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The Ubiquity of Wallflowers

Tina looks out the window of the BART train, as the scenery of the East Bay rolls by. The day is dark and dreary, and I can tell by the way she keeps touching her finger against her lower lip that she wants to have a cigarette. She will have to wait until we get to our destination. There is no smoking on the train. She needed to go to Concord, she told me, although she didn’t say why. I am going with her, because she hates taking BART alone. She said she doesn’t like going through the tunnel underneath…

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Deleting the Dead

“There’s something remarkably sad about a website that belongs to a person who is dead,” Tina says. Her bare feet are up on the dashboard of my car, the window cracked so that she can periodically ash her cigarette out of it. I don’t let anyone smoke in my car, but Tina is the empress of the passenger seat. Her reality is as she wills it. She has a flower in her hair, some pretty blue thing she had picked from the floral display at the grocery store, snapping it off the stem and putting it behind her ear as…

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