☠❀☠❀☠❀☠❀☠

Do you find consolation in a person? In a woman? I found it once with a man, but I lost my combs. This was the last time I saw him. In the cab going home is when I saw the combs, one on top of the other on the table beside his couch. It would have been better if he had been the one to remove them, but when they interfered with the travel of his hands, I was the one who slipped the combs out. They are just cheap plastic, their job not to ornament but to secure and vanish in hair. It is not like leaving behind an earring, something that needs to be joined with a mate. The combs cost nothing, so he did not think to return them. But they’re the only ones that work in my kind of hair, and you can’t often find the ones that blend in with your hair. They tend to be packaged in assortments of a dozen, in garish bright primary colors. Before I left that night, I used his hairbrush when we finished. I left long hairs caught in the bristles, making of his hairbrush a kind of reliquary.

Where is the consolation in this? It is in humiliation, which brings the softness of heart that allows you to listen to God.

“You a student over at the college?” The cabdriver, gunning for a tip.

I still want those combs back. I need all the things I left behind back. Better to find consolation in a place. At the beach. A day at the beach when everything rhymes: crabs picked clean, one thong—green, flies blown in on a warm land breeze, parking lot rainbow in a pool of gasoline; diving seagulls, blasted boat hulls, sea-scarred plastic, rusted bedstead, rotting refuse, fish now dead.