An asteroid burst of bright white light overtook the darkness of the dining room. From behind our closed eyelids that white light pierced us completely, body and mind. All the while our medium—a gorgeous lady in her mid-40s whose tolerance for shenanigans is violently non-existent—she told us not to open our eyes. I felt the bright white light cover me in a warmth so deep it was heart-breakingly like the sudden very distant touch of somebody you were in love with in the past. And then, abruptly, the white light became cold. Light became a memory as the room sulked, instantly dark and heavy. Our medium said, “It’s over.”

Through the window of the train on the way to the clinic I watched curved ramps on the highway dart across the horizon, curling like snakes.

American misunderstandings.

You left a small patch of skin in the car, on the edge of the rearview mirror from when you skinned your back trying to climb out when the two crows flew in. I peeled the patch of skin off and it was soft as tissue paper. The same thing had once happened to me when I was younger, trapped in between two closely placed wooden slat fences while I tried to take a shortcut home through the neighborhood’s backyards and met up close and personal with an unsuspecting wasp nest. I scraped up my arms and shoulders, leaving similar tissue paper-ish parts of me hooked to splinters in the haste and panic of egress.

The conversations we used to have while sitting on the bench outside the front entrance is what I think I’ll miss the most about about the Library in Audrey Heights. I drove by it last week because I’d heard it was demolished, and sure enough, there was no trace of it anymore, just an empty lot. It had been wiped clean of every fragment of brick and dust, leaving no visual account of the past. My memories are not the clearest, and those old conversations are no longer set in stone in my mind, but I seem to remember it as looking from outside, as somebody else looking on over the two of us. I can see us sitting there talking, always waiting for the bus, laughing about something or other. It seems like all I can do anymore is retreat into the past. I haven’t felt right about a thing in years.