He is sitting in the corner of the car with a red suitcase, coming or going, I can’t tell. A blue paper cup of cheap diner coffee and he is in a nodding groggy twilight, bent nearly double, hand fumbling the brim of a baseball cap lower on his face. He is drunk-sleeping and slipping away and the coffee falls to the floor. It was a full cup, and the smell of milky sweet fills this corner of the train. His face fills with embarrassment too, as other riders lift their feet to avoid the sticky wash, but soon enough he won’t remember it at all.

All last week a crew was outside the park gates, removing a tree that had been growing through the wrought iron for fifty or sixty years. They were disassembling slowly, taking off the arcing branches, gradually de-limbing, then cutting the trunk down in rounds with a chain saw. Now they are to the part that has merged with the fence, now they must continue by hand, now a necessary intimacy. He has selected his weapon, an axe, and I watch his shoulders move, watch tiny slivers fall away, the tree steadily dwindling even further.

Today I am missing the perfectly imperfect, the soft hand with the rough nail, the kiss that unmakes and makes me, both. There is no time for this. I lay my tools out on my desk, this is what there is today. This is all there is.