Imogen Howe was exiting the zone. For five hours she had driven nonstop. The same ten songs playing on repeat. She had felt like a machine the entire time. There was nothing that was going to stop her. She passed by each car smoothly. Hit no potholes. Hardly touched the...

She was thinking about Chip from the gas station. He was an older man. Not death bed old, but old enough to be... well older than her dad. He had a walking stick. She didn't see him stand up and walk, but she could imagine him walking with a limp.

She...

After the two guests leave the cafe she feels light. Rather than smiling faces and hungry attentions she is greeted by empty cups with beet stains and coffee stains at the bottom.

Imogen Howe doesn't enjoy having random people from her old life crawling into her current one. Which...

One thing she hated about the suburbs was that you could never run into someone while standing outside.

Though you didn't get any privacy either. It was the worst of both worlds.

This night she pretended she was downtown smoking her  cigarette and someone might pass her and ask to bum one...

She was driving back alone after the beach.

On the drive there her minivan had been packed with so many people that if the cops pulled them over she would've gotten a ticket.

That had been a fun ride. High sun, blue sky, and the music up loud with the windows down....

She showed up to town a day early.
This surprised me. I was used to her being fashionably late wherever she went.

Final Friday, some no name party at a no name  cafe out in the middle of nowhere. Why did she come out such a way for this?

She drove her  Subaru...

It was Tuesday when it began looking like it would rain forever. Maybe Jeannie wouldn't want to go to the beach this weekend after all. 

Imogen hoped for this. "I want to see you in a bikini" Jeannie said, joking, with a  Busch Light in hand. "You always wear one...

On Tuesday I had 14 unread text messages. I didn't go on a phone sabbatical or anything. But on Saturday Jeannie Hammond broke my heart and I haven't responded to anything from her since. 

I told Meghan about this in the form of a question where I asked if she'd...

After high school she sought to run her own cafe because of insecurities. She wasn't smart enough to go to a real university like  Jeannie Hammond . And out of all the jobs she could think of, running a  cafe seemed the most respectful.

That was a naive belief constructed by...

It was  Tuesday night. Pitch black where she sat inside an orange SUV, the engine cut on the unlit parking lot across from the gas station. Jeannie was inside, picking up a 24 pack of Miller Lite using her cousin's ID.

Two things were on Imogen's mind as she listened to...

Jeannie Hammond thought of the perfect way to spend her day off. And she did something else.

There was a doner truck that sold the best kebab in Berlin two corners away from his apartment. He went and got a loaf of bread from a Kaiser mart instead. 

She came home...

Her invitation came out of the blue. A message over Facebook sparked a conversation. We talked nonstop until we agreed that she would visit me during winter break.

It was strange because we hadn't kept in touch until that message over Facebook. But once we began chatting it felt like...

It had rained everyday until Friday so the air was cool. The clouds didn't give us their all, she thought as she looked up. Or new clouds had simply formed already in their place after falling to the ground as rain. 

When was a cloud in the air, that cloud?...

She began her story slow... and then it went fast. I suddenly felt like I was sucked into her high school self. But her story reminded me so much of mine it felt uncanny. Like she was speaking for me. Telling my story.

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Imogen and I became friends during that...

Lately I've been hearing a lot this quote from Sam Harris: you might have done something for the last time today. We go through our lives thinking we have endless horizons. That we will have yet another shot at everything. But this isn't true. Sometimes you tell a friend goodbye,...

Later while alone it what I wanted when around Jeannie became clear. It went beyond her flesh, past the mere material -- just as how the story of a book is worth more than the ink and paper that contain it, 

I'd been daydreaming too much about my meetings with...

Jeannie was talented. And incredibly beautiful. When such beauty is paired with even a modicum of talent the halo effect swindles you into hyperbolizing all non tangible assets about them. But no matter how much of that fallacy I was victim to, from an objective stance Jeannie Hammond just really...

The other day I felt just how old I was. In a major city I wouldn't be old, more middle aged for working at a media company, but at Balloon House I was definitely the boomer. Everybody else was either fresh out of college or still in it. Our budget...

It was from Imogen that he learned Jeannie Hammond would need his help that afternoon. The tone within the texts although far from scathing couldn't be considered warm. The neutral, room-temperature tone made him expect the worst. What had Jeannie done this time?

After the ritual of scrolling up and down...