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Flag | May 23 2003

Her technique, she said, is to put those particular feelings on a raft in her mind and push the raft out to sea and then sit on the beach and watch it drift away, or maybe leave for a time and come back to find it far from shore, just a bobbing speck, or perhaps broken to pieces because she didn’t do such a good job putting it together.

Most recently there was a man she liked so much she made a flag with which to surrender to him. Lacking a proper flag, she used four paper napkins left over from a time she had bought a take-out burrito. She unfolded the napkins (they were surprisingly big: 11 1/2 by 7 1/2 inches) and taped them together with scotch tape and waved the taped-together pieces at a particularly beautiful email he had sent, hoping he could feel it though of course not believing he could.

Whether he did or didn’t feel it, he soon did some things that upset her, fucked-up things, she declined to give specifics, so on the subway ride home she put the napkin flag on a raft but it blew off almost immediately and landed in the water and quickly broke into pieces, with the pieces floating on top of the water as the waves came in, but not actually going anywhere, just floating like that, idly, until at last her stop came and she walked home.