Faye breaks into Cop 663’s apartment and she is a thief of sorts because she’s trying to steal his heart but she’s also an interior decorator and queen of the snack bar and a Mamas and the Papas superfan with blaring dreams of California and that’s what she’s creating in the lovesick Cop’s apartment, A California of the Mind, Faye as a Ferlinghetti of 1990s Hong Kong, carrying bags of fish and bars of soap like poems and images into the mind and soul of Cop 663, the same cop who is cheered by a dripping towel because it means the world, his little world, is weeping with him, the pathetic fallacy of grief, and Faye is dancing and flailing and lounging in his apartment, a mischievous sprite occupying his space in his absence and reorganizing it, rewriting it—goodbye slim soap, goodbye sheets housing his ex’s solitary pillow-hidden hair and countless memories—and I want Faye to steal the letter that embodies my heartache and my keys along with it, keys to my heart, my hopes, my history, and redecorate and rewrite it, call 1-800-GOT-JUNK and let in a whole team of muscle-bound scavengers to liberate me from the memories of my dead grandmother housed in the small Florentine vase, her dementia and disappointment, and my perennially ill mother’s litany of expectations unmet in me woven into my Turkish carpet and my dead father’s cirrhotic liver in the half-empty bottle of Lagavulin I can neither drink nor pour down the drain and my first girlfriend’s India ink copy of Picasso’s Quixote dedicated to me though I never figured out if I was the delusional knight or Sancho or Rocinante or the windmill or the sun and the leaky tent I pitched precariously on so many mountains trying to escape myself when she dumped me and the cheap and goofy orange Swatch my last girlfriend bought me, its battery dying not long after she left me not for a man but for the children he promised to raise with her and milling about, gawking at these belongings, are the ghosts of all the people I could have been, take it all, Faye, and this Faye, my version of Faye, will slip away too—always leave them wanting more—but a year later she’ll return in a cute uniform playing it cool and I’ll greet her with a cleared-out heart, airy, uncluttered, and she’ll greet me and together we’ll draw boarding passes to a thousand, a million, a billion other places, break into a thousand, a million, a billion other homes and hearts and histories, and free those people of the junk weighing them down so they too can fly wherever love will take them.  

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Jon Doughboy is a lowly clerk at Bartleby & Co. Prefer not to with him @doughboywrites