How?
In the summer, on Thursdays, I would often go to Crow Bar, down on Mississippi, for Karaoke. The walk’s not bad if the night is warm. When you don’t use the microphone you have to sing louder, so that’s what I’d do: drown out my thoughts with my own voice.
One night, closing my tab at the bar, while my head was turned, someone slipped a torn photograph of a woman onto the bar in front of me. The right third of the picture is tinted orange from some error in exposure or developing.She smiles softly, sitting in a bar (out the window behind her you can see a tiny piece of an Oregon Lottery keno sign) head turned three quarters profile. A red-eyed Mona Lisa.
On the back, in the functional cursive of a pharmacist, is written: “If you could live your life exactly as you’d like, how would that look?”
There is a line below that, and then an empty space, perhaps inviting response.
When I got home I taped it up next to my bed, woman facing the wall. It’s still there, reminding me that I haven’t figured out an answer to that question.