You will meet your greatest loves under the worst of circumstances.

And it is true, that to live like this, you take what you can, and you give to nothing, at least in a metaphysical sense. To look at her now, it might be hard to see that it was ever even a whisper, never mind a plan and an action.

But you loose these people after sporadic months of crime and violence, after pushing seeds deep into impressionable soil, and then to leave, you’re on your own and to grow as you may.

Occasionally, they grow upright and strong, more often, crooked and half dead. Because this self-preservation can only take you so far, and soon, it wont even have to do with you.

- She gets old, and she gets dead, and maybe she takes these secrets with her -

There is nothing special about the life of a girl like that, except that the people who lived inside it would occasionally tell her so.

She was shaken by the last death rattle of the city, all though the connotations are relative, but she was too busy scouring the sidewalks for the true face of its streets to know her own. Her belief in the city had been based, years before, on an open Hollywood interpretation, and a mythology older than its earth, and so it was in this she placed her faith.

But there was something left behind, for her and those like her, even after all the politics, able to enjoy the creeping pleasures and fixtures of her true home. She found a peace of mind in the crooked composure of the hooker on Ave. A, selling her white babies for twice as much. Or in the playful face of a 9-year-old selling crack in a stairwell in the projects, the ones that never left. And the coming home to someplace warm, even in the cold, even alone, was still more than nothing. So it was in that, there, despite it all, that she found a kind of peace, maybe because it was her peace to find. Because, in that moment, walking half broken down those streets was still more than gliding above all others.

She slept on the tired dirty mattresses beneath the crumbling bridges and dark underpasses; or in a friend’s townhouse or penthouse, lake houses. She counted her money in bundles and complained that she never dreams when she sleeps anymore. But it was no longer her place to say. She collected the bones of the cats that died in the building where she kept an apartment uptown, and she quietly prayed for them in the room she used to sleep in.

Girls like that can’t brake from the earliest of memories. And will spin her stories with the quiet resignation that they were never her memories in the first place.