text: This will ideally be a multi-part story dealing with the aftermath of a tragic event. Part 1 - Letters/The people we wish we knew A. She worked in an office where she made 12$ an hour and the coffee looked terrible. She punched numbers into a spreadsheet and wrote cash reports by hand, scrawled in pencil and she laughed at the jokes. The racist jokes, the sexist jokes, the jokes about menopause and children and shit. She read a book while she worked and brought a new one in every week. Jane Austen, Bukowski, and Dostoyevsky and Salinger and Aristotle. She listened to them talk about their husbands while she collected papers and added numbers up, she listened to them berate their boyfriends and butcher foreign politics while she made paper clip necklaces. It was the kind of job where you didn’t make much and the coffee was terrible and you still drank at least three cups every shift. She wore stockings with tears in them and sweater dresses and worn boots. She wore a leather jacket and big sunglasses and crooked half-smile. She chewed on her pens and her pencils and she got so lost in her own thoughts that the girls she worked with would call her half a dozen times before she heard them and her eyes would light up like fireworks when she came to. I didn't work in her office, I didn't know her name, but I felt like I knew her. I sat in security and the screens surrounding me were a blanket of black and grey and the images were a blur of bodies and movement, and there she was, sitting still as the the grainy world catapulted around her. B. He wore beat up runners and a three day stubble, I never quite caught his name. His uniform was too big on bony shoulders and he was intense looking; with eyes that made you feel naked and vulnerable. He had an easy smile and the kind of tan you get from working outdoors, he was always humming The Smiths under his breath. I thought about him when I got home and drank a glass of wine, pulled off my work clothes and washed off my face, touched myself as I lay on the couch: eyes closed, for a minute, I thought of him. Every few days I’d pick up a different bottle of wine and he’d be wearing the same stubble and the same stare as he packed my purchases into paper bags. Sometimes he would ask me how my day was, or what the weather was like outside. He noticed when I cut my hair and always told me to enjoy the book crooked under my arm. I liked him more than most people I worked with, that I saw every day, but I never quite caught his name. I imagined him going home to a girl with a cheap haircut and a part time job who loved him more than life itself. I imagined him going home to a ramshackle house, rented, with sunflowers growing in the front yard. I imagined him smoking a joint and strumming on an acoustic guitar, calling to the girl for a beer and thinking about not exactly anything when the bottle pressed against his lips. I wish I knew him, I still do. C. We rode the subway together every morning, sat in the same train, and read the same newspaper. He had a kid with him, two or three, pressed next to him and chattering away in that way that kids do: no purpose or drive, just words strung together and volume up and down. He always looked calm like he’d just finished a yoga class or something and I’m sure that cup he carried was filled with green tea and not the triple sweetened, whipped-cream-covered, diabetes-in-a-cup in my own travel mug. I always wondered he stayed that way, even when the train stalled and the kid screamed and spilled juice all over his paper, he stayed calm. When it was raining and snowing and it was hot as all hell, he was calm. I never said hello to him or even smiled at him and I don’t think I ever caught his eye but he was the kind of person that just made you feel better, just to be around him. I wish I had asked him how he stayed that calm, I wish I had known his girl’s name, I wish I had brought her candy on halloween. Her and her father dressed in matching costumes; Thing 1 and Thing 2 from Dr. Seuss . Sometimes he read to her, on halloween he read that to her and she was so quiet that for a moment she looked just like he did, eyes went placid and focused all at once. I wonder what happened it was like for her, after it had ended. I wonder if she ever found her daddy’s calm again. I wish I knew her, I wish I could tell her that I’m sorry.