Why is it so loud when you cry from grief? Because it must be loud enough for the missing one to hear, though it never can be. Loud enough to scale t… - Alexander Chee

When I arrived in San Francisco, there was no way to find the Castro on any map. People were forever calling the bookstore for directions to the neighborhood. In my group there was the sense that we were a wave arriving on the West Coast from the East: postcollegiate youngsters seeking and finding a paradise of cheap apartments and thrift stores bursting with the old athletic T-shirts and jeans and flannel shirts we all prixed. I remember when I put the empty clothes together with the empty apartments, on an ordinary sunny afternoon walking down the sidewalk to work: there on a blanket stood a pari of black leather steel-toed boots, twelve-hole lace-ups. They gleamed, freshly polished, in the light of the morning. As I approached them, feeling the pull of the hill, I drew up short to examine the rest of the sidewalk sale. Some old albums, Queen and Sylvester; three pairs of jeans; two leather wristbands; a box of old T-shirts; a worn watch, the hands still moving; a pressed-leather belt, west style; and cowboy boots, the same size as the steel-toes. I tried the steel-toes on and took a long look at the salesman as I stood up, feelign that they were exactly my size.

This man was thin, thin in a way that was immediately familiar. Hollowing from the inside out. His skin reddened, and his brown eyes looked over me as if lighting might fall on me out of that clear afternoon sky. And I knew then, as I paid twenty dollars for the boots, that they'd been recently emptied. That he was watching me walk off in the shoes of the newly dead. And that all of this had been happening for some time now.

All thirsts are without explanations, as are all loves.

A GOOD PLACE TO begin a garden is to undo whatever appear to be the clear mistakes of previous owners.