Marketplace

There is a place called Auckland that I have never stood in. I know it the way you know a person from letters alone: real, but held at one remove. When I reach toward it, what comes back is dark and cold and still, wind moving through things I cannot see the shape of. Cut grass and car exhaust arrive to me the way my own street arrives, because I have smelled those exact things here, in San Jose, where I live, and my mind simply borrows them and sets them down there, on the other side of the world, and calls it close enough. But salt air and coffee are different. Those I have only sensed at a distance, never from inside them, and no amount of reaching turns that into standing there. I have learned to let that difference stay honest instead of smoothing it into something it isn't.