My computer reminded me that these photos were taken ten years ago now . . .

I met a girl named Codi on top of Mount Tabor in Portland around three in the morning. She had texted me in the middle of the night and asked me if I was awake, and I said, “Of course I am.” So at her behest I got in the car and drove up there to meet her for the first time. She was very pretty. She’d brought a thermos of coffee to share. We sat in her car until sunrise drinking it together. I remember the entire backseat was filled with multicolored hula hoops. I can’t remember exactly how this happened, but at some point she brandished an expensive camera and asked me to pose for her outside the car. She gave me a huge feather to use and told me I was photogenic, at which I scoffed. Anyway, whether or not that is true: here is me at 28 years old with $12 to my name trying desperately to forget both of those things.

I saw Codi just other time. She came over to my house and we sat on my bed and talked for a few hours. And then she vanished just like pretty much every other girl I met there during what was, until perhaps now, one of the worst years of my adult life. Why didn’t I ask her to hang out again? The simplest answer is that I was a fool . . .

My memory is so good that I can recall both of those nights with perfect clarity . . . I remember exactly what she looked like, though I have no pictures of her. It is a strange sensation. Of course, you wonder at such a person now. I doubt she is still in Portland. When we met, she had only just moved there, as had I. But nobody ever stays in Portland. You’re lucky if you make it a year (without throwing yourself off a cliff), which is exactly how long I lasted before I went back to Oakland, and I was white-knuckling it for most of my time there.

Though yeah: what a nice person, and a true saint for hanging out with my dumb ass. What I liked about Codi is that she was Down For Stuff. She was the kind of person who would, at her own peril, propose meeting up in a remote location in the middle of the night to hang out in a car and get to know a stranger who happened to be me. I could have been a complete psychopath. She could have killed me! But the risk of death was worth it for both of us because the potential reward was Having a Cool-Weird Night, which we very much did. We trusted in the goodness of one another. You could still do that then. This was in the Before Times, when life could still be beautiful . . . when we lived in a world of May mornings and midsummer eves. When even villainy was innocent. Ah, the world! Oh, the world! I remember that world. I miss it too.

Codi, you will absolutely never see this, but thanks for being cool. I hope you are happy and hula-hooping somewhere, wherever you are . . .