I take a seat on an empty bench, wood slats crusted with pigeon crap and greasy bits of shawarma. A sumac casts lace shadows on raised beds. I gaze into shadow-leaves like they are tea leaves and picture my old apartment: the jute baskets holding plastic pots of philodendron, spider plants, and devil’s ivy hanging above the kitchen sink; our living room full of beautiful books, peace lilies, succulents; light streaming through a far window, illuminating dust crystals of cat litter suspended in the air like so much glitter—and for half a breath, I’m twenty-five all over again, wondering what the future holds, wondering if I’ll be somebody someday, wanting to be more than someone’s something, but wanting to be a part of a pair anyway. Getting my wish. I’m twenty-six and full of love, stroking our kitten’s Jackson Pollock face, marveling at her religious devotion to play and limitless capacity for forgiveness, delighting in her tiny meow that was more of a chirp, telling Stuart she sounded like the house finch that nested just outside my bedroom window in Missouri one summer and Stuart saying, Finch it is. In my mind, Stuart holds a match to a stick of incense mounted on a wooden sleigh on the kitchen counter. Sick to my stomach, I hold a hand to my mouth.

On the reclining lounge chair next to mine, a musk-soured man stretches out and pulls a half-empty sleeve of Saltines from a bulging pocket on his stained cargo pants. A mangy pigeon lands on his belt buckle, and I suddenly feel like crying. “Shae,” I whisper, summoning two ghosts: Shae’s and the long-gone side of myself who could sit for hours in parks around the city, almost (but not quite) believing in telepathy and afterlives.

I open my eyes. People pass in and out of the scene sprawled before me, eating sandwiches and tossed salads, talking on cell phones or talking to themselves. I close my eyes again, and when I open them seconds later, the scene has changed, if merely by degrees. New players are eating, talking and walking with the flow, drifting along with the current of this place. A woman in platform sneakers trips in front of me but does not fall. She turns to stare at the pavement, blaming it for her misstep, but she keeps her pace, and the scene changes once again. I break a blade of zebra grass from the potted prairie at my back, imagine Shae by my side, whisper, “I miss you like crazy today.” It isn’t silly at all, I told Bess just this morning, and so I turn my whisper inward and silently tell my best friend everything, pulling every tiny tooth that’s been gnawing at my conscience all summer. The whole truth and nothing else.

•  •  •

Life jumped the tracks again this summer.