I walked until blood blossomed with each step; under the eucalyptus, past the beggars, taco trucks, and street musicians, through the wide-eyed world; until I needed dinner, kind words, a seat on a train heading homeward.

Meanwhile, jacaranda bloomed in a season of drought. Hummingbirds waited with their wings folded against the rogue breeze. He was married, she was unemployed, they just had a kid. The Gold Teeth Master had moved and the biker bar was now a tiki lounge, complete with erupting volcano, puffer fish lamps, and hula dancing robot. The correct time was no longer available by phone. Houses for millionaires proliferated.

One day I stood on a familiar street, next to the last indie cinema palace. It was gutted. Construction workers shouted within its dark, detritus-strewn interior. Frayed posters plastered the box office windows. Forever closed like a lost Pandora box, on a day like any other day, a day that I hadn't noticed, I had moved so much, I had moved so swiftly and intently.

How do you mourn for a place? How do you write obituaries for a house, a tree, a cave that led to a secret grotto overflowing with salty moonshine? So goes the epitaph: There ended the last movie of the last day in the world of my girlhood.

Elsewhere the war machine rolled on.

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