It was between 9:15 and 11:08 on a Tuesday morning, and I had skipped class. Already off campus, the decision seemed distant, abstract, tossing money into the ocean and watching it sink, a blip on the surface. Still, at the Downtown Berkeley bus stop, it gnawed at me, a dog salivating at my rib bone. Guilt isn’t always gouging; sometimes it rises soft, steady. On this day, mine arrived like a tide, lapping at edges of awareness. Persistent and rhythmic, with the patience of something that knows it’s inevitable.

Around me, seven people, maybe eight, were huddled below an awning, sparrows waiting out the rain. The sky pressed grey and low, softening everything into the same muted shade: faces, buildings, wings, clouds, all shrouded in mildness. Rendering the edges of things indistinct, the light made us anonymous. A good day to disappear.

I rocked back and forth on my heels, detached and peering. I watched the sidewalk. I watched the gum stuck to the curb. I watched people not watching me. The figures around me blurred and melted at the edges. The faces in my periphery made it easy. They were so matter-of-fact, transparent, palpably indifferent. There was something strangely comforting in that: how little anyone noticed. 

If I let my eyes unfocus, I could slip out of my body, hide in the fog. It felt like a gift. A pocket of stillness between buses, between breaths. And in that space, I left. Not by stepping forward, no,but by tunneling inward, a spiral, a bruise blooming under my skin.

Perversely, I liked the self-imposed ache. Maybe it was the routine of it, the cyclical choreography. I skipped class. I looked for things to fill a hole. New things, and old things, things I already knew wouldn’t work. I couldn’t tell if I was thinking or just remembering. Everything I did just traced an outline, longing. Each thought recapitulated a prior belief. Each turn to consolation mirrored a previous deflection of desire. I was weaving fabric over a void. My mind folding and refolding into pleats and creases, same as yesterday, same as the day before. 

Lately, I’d felt like starting over. But not clean. Not new. Just starting again. And again. “Yet once more,” those words had teeth. Not grief-hungry but shameful, gnawing, and abdominal. The ache of reenactment. Watching myself become a rerun, I wanted to unzip my forehead, reach in, and scratch the past few months out of existence.

Then,  

Suddenly, a voice, high and squeaky, sliced through me, interrupting.

“Do you want a cough drop, honey?”

I blinked and there she was. An old woman wrapped in layers of clothes, a crumpled paper doll with a conductor’s hat. Colorful. Soft. Someone’s eclectic aunt from a dream, at once made corporal. She startled me into presence.

I didn’t realize I had been coughing. Honestly, I didn’t think I could be loud enough to get noticed, but she did. Plucking me from grey obscurity, she held out a yellow cough drop, crusty at the edges. I took it. No hesitation. I wasn’t thinking about germs or trust or danger, I just didn’t want to waste her kindness. 

She patted the bench beside her. I sat obediently, unwrapping. A lemony taste, dry and sugary at the edges, caught the back of my throat. My friends would have rolled their eyes, told me I was too trusting, too open. I imagined them, shaking their heads in disapproval, in warm amusement. I just wanted to say yes to a stranger. To trust the world to hold me. And it did. 

As I settled beside her, she began to talk, seamlessly slipping into a Shakespearean soliloquy. She told me this was her first time outside since major spinal surgery. Said it like it was a debut performance. She complained about her doctors, told me about the young ones, handsome ones, ones who smiled too much or not enough. Her words rapidly intertwined and tumbled in a cascade, so clearly revealing the raw contours of her mind. I was an intruder. 

Nodding in silent comprehension, I turned the cough drop over in my mouth. My tongue paused, caught on its shape, on the unpredictable rhythm of her words. As she spoke, the folds of her skin rippled unnervingly, maintaining a tired smile. Then from her bag, a black-and-white paper suddenly appeared, something glossy. Her fingers moved in memory; she folded and creased. A tangible manifestation of her restless energy, my eyes were drawn to her lap. She noticed. Smiled intimately. Like I was the only one who’d ever known her hands.

Before I could ask, she was done.

“These are my birds,” she stated.“They dance,” 

Facing me, she revealed a perched Origami Crane. 

She told me she had made hundreds using the paper from CD cases, from albums she couldn’t live without. She would play music loud, “turned all the way up,” windows open, and let her cranes fly. Hung from invisible strings tied to the ceiling, dancing to the songs inscribed on their bodies. “They twirled,” she said. Some found each other. Fell in love. Others fought. You could tell by the way they passed; “you just could.”

I listened, enraptured. She didn’t look at me much. She talked to the air, to the ceiling of her apartment. Stories filling up the muted space between us. 

Eventually, her flighty gaze met mine. A pause. A punctuation. And I was struck by her beauty, her eccentricity. I wanted to be her. I wanted to live in her whimsical world, my existence too framed by dancing Paper Cranes. I imagined spinning gently in a sun-drenched room, twisting with each new note, hanging weightless from a fishing line. I wanted so badly to press play. To make my world move again. 

And then, 

The 7 to Oakland arrived. It hissed like a snake, loud and rude. Snapped out of our shared reverie, she got up abruptly and shuffled to the open doors. Our moment had always had a timer.

Halfway to the bus, she stopped, turned around and pressed the crane into my palm. 

“I just love Leonard Cohen,” she whispered, her voice lilting and ethereal.

And then she was gone. Boarding without smiling, disappearing into the bowels of the bus. It was now between 9:32 and 11:35 am on a Tuesday. 

I looked down at her gift, stunned. I hadn’t remembered to thank her. As the traffic swallowed her whole, I felt finally visible. Left with her inky heart perched in my static hands.

So I walked straight home. Found a string. Hung it from my ceiling and blasted Cohen’s Suzanne. 

I set it free.

I watched as the crane danced gleefully by herself. Alone, but not lonely. I couldn’t stop the tears. I laid on the ground, looking up, happily letting my dollars drown, guilt forgotten.

As I reached to touch my wet face, I felt creases growing, cutting a canyon between my brows. 

As if it were her plan all along, I found myself smiling her smile. Involuntarily, my eyes closed, and I heard rustling wings multiply. Suddenly heavy, her years fell on me. I felt us merge. Old, young, folded, together, humming. Her restlessness in my body. Her years on my shoulders. Her birds in my sky. Stuffed into her form, I imagined living out her life. I had stolen her joy and assumed her identity, tangled in string, back sore, lemon on my tongue. Gasping, panic rose, sharp and bright, a metallic heartbeat in our ears. We started to choke. With no air in our lungs, the body slowed, static. 

But,

There is a sliver of light seeping under a door, heat under eyelids, “there is a crack, a crack in everything,” a salvational breeze. It’s then I know, “that’s how the light gets in.” 

So I open my eyes, and it’s my window that’s open. It’s my ceiling, my crane, and I’m the one listening to Leonard Cohen. He holds me, singing: She touched your perfect body with her mind. 

And I take flight.