38: Grafitti

On the wall outside the music room, some long gone students painted “Tony Tim 1972.” At seven, I read those names over and over, forgetting my tambourine. To me, the past was a locked box, memory a silent film. Was that why boys painted their names on walls? Did that mean I would always be timid? When I was twenty-six, a boy wrote my name on the wall of the men’s room in a bar we loved. “Gina is amazing.” Eventually, he changed his mind. And still there I am, pinned in his tribute, drunk against the jukebox, too sick to stand.

37: Farewell, Pripyat

(Pripyat is an abandoned city near the Chernobyl power plant.)

The radio says the evacuation will last three days. Olena dismisses her class. The children cheer—it’s a holiday. When they are gone, she straightens empty desks. Three days. Her chemist father taught her isotopes, half lives. On the chalkboard she writes: There is no return. Farewell. It is her defense, presuming the worst. How silly she’ll feel erasing that message next week. Only last night on her friend’s balcony, they watched the power plant glow red, an ember tucked safely in folds of distance. Her nose tingled with ash. She stared in awe, as though seeing fire for the first time.

36: Portrait with Scissors

A skinny kid, nineteen, stands in a grimy kitchen holding a pair of scissors above his head. Grey afternoon light silhouettes beer bottles, a coffee can of cigarette butts, the scissors’ open jaw. His arm arched, so grand a gesture that he must be performing, maybe for the pink-haired girl at the edge of the frame. He’s in love with her. She’s sleeping with his best friend. Night after night the three of them share the same cheap room. Eventually she leaves the photograph. The kitchen is torn down for condos. Only he’s left, frozen and dumbstruck, the slave of her perfection.

35: Double

I saw her once in National Geographic, a child growing up amidst the civil war of Eastern Europe, her straggly brown hair and round eyes the mirror of my own. I didn’t show anyone, knowing how my brother sneered at my seriousness, knowing this girl was one of the sacred sufferers for whom my mother prayed. Any comparison to me invited scorn. Instead I stared until the afternoon light faded. I was not transformed, didn’t suddenly recognize myself as one of a human tribe, but, instead, understood our separation, my unrecorded unreality, the sheer randomness of my birth. I could be anyone.

34: How To Be With Someone

Let go of superstition. Don’t look for signs in fortune cookies or count steps to his apartment. Become a literalist. Stay says only be here now. Remember the meaning of any phrase expires the moment after he utters it. Leave no evidence—not hair in the tub nor perfume in the sheets—so that you can disappear as easily as he would. When you walk, swing your arms like it doesn’t matter if he takes your hand. Live as he does, as though no bird were trapped in your rib cage, as though you didn’t cough and lose feathers to the air.

33: Carlos Rio Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Joe and Melanie move into the apartment, but the mail for Carlos Rio never stops. How strange to meet a man through his bills and catalogues, she thinks. “Who moves and doesn’t change his address?” Joe says. At first they leave the mail on the ledge. After weeks, Joe tapes a note to the mailbox. Melanie hopes it doesn’t work. She can’t help but read the postcard with the photo of a San Juan statue. Carlos, Lo Siento. Donde estas? Melanie buys a Spanish dictionary. River, she thinks, tracing a line across the mirror steamed with Joe’s shower. She will find him.

32: The Accident

Bonnie escapes outside to smoke, to forget he’s leaving her, bit by bit. She hears a thump, a man’s startled grunt, and turns to see a car angled, a man lying in the street, struggling, an insect on its back. The woman driver is screaming. People on the sidewalk shout, “don’t get up!” as if eager for injury. But he picks up his bike and limps away. The woman yells, “Don’t go!” Bonnie remembers when they met it felt like a collision, sudden and dangerous. The crowd on the sidewalk scatters, disappointed, expecting tragedy but left with the rest of the day.