Her t-shirt says “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful, hate me because I’m a bitch.” I feel disinclined to hate anyone, but since she does not look to be beautiful in any obvious sense of the word, I am hoping she’s wrong about the bitch part too.

The poster on the subway wall wants you to eat a handful of peanuts every day. So the picture is of a handful of peanuts. I draw eyes and teeth and horns and scales on them, turning them into tiny monsters. If you put them in your mouth, they might bite you back.

I am sitting on the bench, sweat still running off my elbows from my run. She walks by and smiles gently, so I do too. Then she offers me her Jesus. No, thank you though.

That big boule of coffee with dinner and Stevie Ray Vaughan’s amphetamine fingers have me tick-tick-ticking this cab ride home. In my absence, someone referred to me as a bombshell. Retold, that makes me blush, until I realize a blinkered memory of black seamed stockings is probably all he had gotten away with. I look at my friend and she is beautiful to me and I realize that doesn’t translate so easily to others and for that I am sorry.

They have stopped water-curing the new concrete on the BQE so there is no more late-night waterfall over the high edge at the stoplights next to the projects. Pull over here, across from the pharmacy, where the man with the kufi leaves my tampons sitting straight out on the counter, and I am embarrassed for both of us. The recycling fairies have visited my house, and set out the cans for morning pick-up, what sweetness in that. I hope tonight to fall asleep with a handful of gut-shot postcards from those I hold dearest, run my thumb over tattered landscapes, smooth rills until they are calm, good night, darlings, all.

If they don’t know where you belong when you call, the front desk transfers your call to me. External Relations sometimes means I am the patron saint for the needy and vulnerable. He first says he has a book we may be interested in. Sure, we could send it to the archives. Then photographs of orphans that passed through our doors a hundred years ago. Sure, that’s archival too. Then he wants to send a piece of his deceased father’s artwork. Um, ok. But he is not sure how to send it to us. He’s in Florida, see? He’s about to sell his house. He has cancer. He’s on oxygen. He is homebound. He’s on Medicare. He’s having a little trouble with money these days. I can’t tell if he wants empathy or money. Officially, I have only one of those to give, and not even so much of it.

I am called into the Director’s office. A surprise project, it’s time to renew the certification for the battered women’s shelter. We just did it three years ago, it’s supposed to last for five, but here we go. We have less than a month to push a mountain of paperwork through, but that is not the hardest part. What stuns me is that each piece of paper, each exacting description of policies and procedures, how we do, what we do, carries the crushing weight of necessity. We do this because he held the child out the window and threatened to drop him unless she promised to never leave him. She woke up with her wrists and mouth taped, his knife hacking off her hair. He doused her with lighter fluid, held the book of matches up for her to see.

Today I come to the office, and sit in my chair. I turn on my computer and unpack my bag. The only defense I have is to make sure I am taken care of in the most basic sense, and I have planned for this. I line up an apple, a container of salad, a container of yoghurt, a baggie of cherries, one of blueberries, one of apricots and almonds, one of carrots. I mark my day here this way, and wait for the phone to ring.

It’s 5.30 AM and the man I am looking for isn't on this train. He will still be in bed, his mouth aimed at the ceiling. The window will be slid open to morning air, the sun spill over the hills, a nest of blue sheets. He is not the man standing in front of me, as wide as the subway door, his skin so peppered with tiny moles he looks buckshot. He is not the man standing next to me, enraptured by a daily rag article, the accompanying picture of a bored starlet I don’t recognize.

The woman sitting in front of me is thumbing a novella into her Blackberry, twitching the corner of her mouth in concentration. The woman behind me smooths a dread behind her ear, smacking my shoulder bag in the process. I look to see if I am violating some personal space rule and see she is reading a book with the chapter heading The Territorial Situation. When she turns the page, she smacks me again. That’s pretty funny, I think, then I think about the woman on my other side with a treble clef tattooed under her left ear, wonder where the bass clef is, under her other ear, or lower down somewhere, I guess, if she has a sense of humor.

It’s a beautiful morning. I get to say good morning to Knobs as he leans on his broom, smile all the way back to my molars, watch a moving van back and cut its way around a tight corner, make infinity signs with my hands waiting at the corner.

I'm sorry I was late, coming home from work. The construction lamps in the subway tunnel were just so beautiful. I stared so their blurry stars could light my eyes. Then I carried them home in my chest so I could give them to you.

When he asks you, finally, the thing you have been waiting for him to ask you, it will be just another weekend phone call. The calls to sustain, to bridge, to try to build something out of air and words over miles.

He will be getting his oil changed, you will be stretching your calf after a morning run, and it will happen, just like that. And just like that, there is nothing left to say.

You will not continue the conversation. You will not squeal like an 8 year old at the final swing at the piñata. You will not run up the walls and across that ceiling because that is a physical impossibility. You will not call all your friends, not dump a backhoe of soil on a single bloom.

You will walk into the bathroom to look at your face in the mirror because you will want to remember what this looks like. You will need to close your mouth, gone slack-jawed with surprise. You will go and check the mail. You will make a turkey sandwich with mustard, lettuce, nutty rough bread, no cheese.

You will read the weekend newspaper and you will not remember a word of it because it is really just a placeholder while the crews do their work. That question that was asked brought out the brain elves and cranium fairies and tiny mental miners to do an internal disassemble and rebuild. The hulking rusty and riveted structures rising in defense of disappointment, to dam the flooding seawater of loss, all need to come down.

It looks like a haz-mat clean up effort from a Disney film. Bluebirds, dancing bucket brigades, Bambi nudging rivets out with his nose, gamboling freakin woodland creatures. You will find this quite ridiculous and all rather joyous and you will carry it with you everywhere.

My passport is on some kind of internal exile. I never use it, it was one of those “it’s good to have things” or possibly some ridiculous fantasy that I would ever be able to travel. And ten years and a couple of moves later, it is not in the file where I keep such documents. I don’t think I have lost it in the wider world, I think of it orbiting around the dark galaxies of my closets like Sputnik.

And now I need one. I know it will, and it does, take me several trips to the passport window at the post office to get the documentation right. It is one of those tired, charming old buildings, with slate stairs worn into grooves, yellowing lighting, people shouting in Chinese dialects through the thick glass, voices raised to get over the barriers and the grey-noise of shuffling feet and papers rising to the high ceiling. How fantastically New York, the name of the station is Knickerbocker, it is in Chinatown, there isn’t a native English speaker in front of or behind the service windows.

The last woman I deal with in this matter calls for my documents one by one, adding each one to papers of her own, with cross-checks, stamp, receipts, forms, until she has an untidy, sliding, vari-colored mountain in front of her. Somewhere along the way in her life, through aging and bad American food, she has lost her chin, sunk it away in a slide towards her neck. With that carelessness on my mind, I am not sure I trust her with every official piece of paper that documents my validity in this country.

What twinges me particularly to hand over is the official, notarized change of name order. I can’t even begin to say what that single sheet of fragile, embossed paper means, and I watch it float from my hands to her pile. It should return any day now, with the less-precious companion of my birth certificate, and a blue passport with gold letters on the front. I have had some underlying level of nervousness for the past few days, and the spike of exasperation I feel when I find the passport website down for servicing tells me where the locus is: I am waiting for my self to come home.

There is raspberry jam on the subway stairs.

I am not trying to be judgemental, I'm just trying to find my tribe.

She is taking up two seats with six bags and her wide self. I ask for a space to sit and she moves an enormous handbag over her spread belly. She may be pregnant or just fat. I may be a bitch or just tired.

Cowboy Dave is talking to me as I dig through my backpack. He is not standing too close, but I am uncomfortable because he could see the pair of my underwear surfing to the top as I claw for a pen. Then I realize it doesn't matter any more.

The man in front of me shouts "All I need is a spoon and a paper bag!" as he weaves through the after-work crowd on Fulton Street. I wonder if that is true, if that could really be enough.

Another Saturday night in Brooklyn. Aw c'mon. You know which one is me.

The long-anticipated houseguests have left like the late afternoon tide going out. Empty flat beach, lowering sun, barely a footprint. A tail has come off one of the toys, there is a mass of twisted sheets, in the bathtub drain there will be, I know, a small mat of reddish hair, whose solemn removal I will imbue with an embarrassing sentimentality.

I warned the downstairs neighbor of a week’s worth of pounding small feet and I am pleased that their greeting to the house is, in fact, to run up and down the length of it, clear the shot from front to back. The boy is like a lost pet suddenly found and brought back indoors as he moves from space to space, looking for the right sized niche for himself. I will note that he handles his feet very deliberately on escalators, very cautious of where the shifting world meets his changing physicality.

I am not sure what emotional card trick got the girl to agree to her first rollercoaster ride but we are on deck at the Cyclone and she gets to pick the car. Not in the front, not in the back, in the middle, a car with the letter O on it, is what she wants. I put my arm around her and at the bottom of the first fall press her hard to my side so she will not rise or shift overly much, will know that there is a safety in this risk. I can still feel her slight shoulder pressed deep into my armpit.

Their father, of course, I will miss the most. I could say it is because he is volumetrically the largest. Or because he is the ringmaster of this tiny circus. Or because he leaves the most hair in my bath tub drain. Regardless, the house is emptier and now I go back to the business of my life.