Beginning of My Story...
I recall back in 2020 mopping the floor in the basement lab at San Francisco Catholic Hospital and seeing the bodies of people who’d died from COVID lined up on gurneys. It reminded me of the day you collapsed, Phylla, four years before that in the Starbucks on Leavenworth. I wish I had been able to save you back then. I still have the photos we took together at the instant portrait booth at Fisherman’s Wharf. I keep it in a pouch that used to hold my smartphone, but now we don’t need smartphones anymore, so the pouch is empty, save for those snapshots. Whenever I feel nostalgic, I pull them out of the pouch and remember how beautiful you were with your blue and purple eyes and creamy skin. I was subletting a shoe closet in a two-bedroom house occupied by eight humans. I got my daily Wi-Fi recharge from a Netgear router in the kitchen, and I split my hourly wages with the human who was hired to do the janitorial at the hospital even though I was the one doing the actual work. I managed...