Hear the flowers grow in the vacant lot across the street from the convenience store where you send me to buy cigarettes now that you have left me. You have left me and in the act of having left me, an act that sounds as if you have opened the door and gone outside and then gone somewhere, as if you have vacated as surely as the bus passengers on Broadway climb on board the bus and take their seats and leave their absence on the sidewalk. But you have left, and I have left, and yet we still say hello sometimes, or you say, “can you get me pack of cigarettes?”

The woman reads her book. She marks her place with a slip of paper and places her book inside her purse. She holds her purse under her arm. She climbs on the bus. For a second, she is on the street. Then she is inside and part of the bus. Her face is one face of among the other people on the bus. She is no longer a person I can see and maybe talk to on the street. She is a person on the bus. If she had a phone and you had a phone and her number you could send her a short message. “Remember to bring a pack of gum,” that message being a message to remember me while you are on the bus. But, she is on the bus a face now of all the other passengers and the bus recedes and connects at the transfer station to other routes and she passes away into the mix of other people and is gone.

Flowers do not make a noise while they grow. You can hear them if you listen. They make a leafy rustle as the wind jostles their stems. The daisies are white and dusty from the road traffic. They are coated with dust and carbon. I buy the cigarettes I don’t smoke knowing the man at the store who is always at the store and very polite assumes I have taken up smoking when in fact now that now that you have left, you have taken up smoking because I cannot even complain. I am not glad you are smoking, but I am glad that I can’t tell you to stop. If you want to get on the bus and transfer to the subway at 46th street and get whisked to another part of the city, that’s what you want to do.

I buy your cigarettes. The act of leaving and coming and going is confusing because no one really goes anywhere no matter where they go. There is the noise of flowers, the smell of the bus, and we are free to just walk and ignore the routes, the roads, the lines of demarcation.

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This is part three of a five part series of collaboration between Taibi Mastelse and me. She provided five collages, and I wrote text in response. We passed the pictures and text back and forth, and they are.