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Stations
     after The Bothersome Man by Jens Lien

The city seemed so different once you left. I came home one day from the library and all of our furniture seemed to be gone. I thought somebody had broken in until I realized that only your possessions were missing. Even the clear shower curtain with the goldfish printed on it—you’d just bought it and it still had that new vinyl smell. I’m pretty sure you weren’t just a figment of my imagination, that we did move in together in the summer, did make promises in the fall, and then, when the snow began to fall. . . . No warning signs. No farewell. No note. Your phone number out of service, then transferred to a stranger who asked me to please stop calling, he didn’t know you and he couldn’t help. I rode the buses all night, looping and circling from one end of a line to the other, putting in eight-hour shifts, exiting at random stations to see if you might be among the crowds. Eventually, I stayed mostly inside the buses as they hurried away from the approaching dawn as it revealed stray dogs and abandoned tower blocks on the outskirts. When I wept openly on the bus and nobody looked at me, or during those hours when I was the only person riding, I began to wonder if it wasn’t you who had left the world but me, if I had gradually begun to turn invisible. Rhythmic patterns of clichéd suicides would form in my head: to test if you exist just stab yourself. I imagined that shopkeepers could see me only vaguely flickering, like a ghost or a bad hologram, and I couldn’t seem to turn up my voice to make myself audible. I sent away for a medal of St. Jude from a postal address in Chicago but never heard back. What saved me was a pamphlet that college kids were handing out one day at the station, a map depicting how within fifty years many cities would be inundated by flooding caused by rising sea levels. This cheered me up immensely. I wanted to stay alive to see it happen, and I figured we would meet again in a crowded tent city or a trash barge ferrying survivors to wooded areas up along the Great Lakes, where the great future civilizations of Milwaukee, Detroit, and Cleveland would rise.