The plaza is coming down next month

The plaza is coming down next month.

I pulled over to photograph

what's been ordinary.

The booth sits empty, smaller

than I remembered it.

Through the grimy window: a chair.

A desk. A clipboard, maybe.

Everything covered in the sediment of time.

I tried to conjure his face—

the man who took my money

hundreds of times. The man

whose eyes I never quite met.

The man whose job was to exist

in that small space while I

existed in mine, moving past.

I couldn't remember him.

Not his hair. Not his age.

Not whether he was kind

or just doing the work. I knew

the sound of his voice—flat,

professional, the tone you use

for transactions. But not

the face that held it.

Now I'm grieving someone

I never knew. The booth

will be gone. The job will be gone.

The small exchange—money for passage—

will be gone. Replaced by

something faster, something that doesn't

require us to see each other.

And I'm standing here,

trying to remember a man

whose name I never asked,

whose face I somehow lost

while looking directly at it

hundreds of times.