There's a rustling in the garbage cans, then the clanking sounds of bottles — the high-pitched tinking of glass, the low, bamboo-like strains of plastic. Six bins are lined up in the garden behind my building, each one full with the possibility of someone else's cast-offs. It's 10 am in Oakland, California, and this unknown man is familiar to me. He breakfasts here every morning.

-

Loss, or something like it; the feeling of walking through a window
without hearing the shattering of glass.

It is not that nothing is new — it is that I am not changing.
The tardy arrival of an acceptable self is smacking, inarticulate.