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sent to tell me this—it's working—because when I marshal the available evidence it doesn't look to be working at all. You will be twenty-nine and you live in a room in a basement and wash dishes for money, sometimes, and that love you once had has been gone for some time now. You have learned to speak French so that people don't guess right away that you're English—they think you're Bosnian—and you have friends who love you, and you will have lovers again, and some (if not all) of your projects will bear fruit. Everything is going fine; she sees this even if you don't, and she was sent to tell you.
5 Smoking
    I've been trying to quit smoking for about as long as I've been smoking. I've never really accepted that I'm a smoker, and I've never really been able to stop. When I am depressed, I need to savour this depression thoughtfully, to drink it in, and cigarettes are just the thing.
    Tonight my roommates went out to the bar, full of high spirits and big plans. I didn't want to go. I don't do well at bars, don't like to talk to strangers. I stayed home in my basement, reading. As soon as they left, I felt it coming on, that feeling, that need. I went to the gas station, and came back and sat on my stoop.
    It is a cold night, foggy. Across the street is a tree whose black outline corresponds to my mood—if only I could draw it!—and on one of the old brownstones a chimney, and from it a plume of smoke rising, mirroring the smoke of my cigarette, the smoke from my lungs, and the whole conspiring to intensify and shape this feeling inside of me:one part longing, one part not having; one part loneliness, one part love of these foreign surroundings and people I don't know and never will. I cultivate this feeling; it is pure and visceral and deep, made of the same stuff as the sagging former factories and forlorn trees bereft of leaves, the minor-chord song I can hear (but not sing), the drawing I can see (but not put down on paper). I have worked on this mode of feeling for years—but what's the use if I can't render it? Where is the form? What use these inward epiphanies?

Evidence
    by Ian Colford
    The plane went down at night in a thunderstorm, almost a mile short of a rural landing strip somewhere in Northern India. Everyone was killed. I heard the report on the radio the next morning while I was eating breakfast. The news did not make much of an impression on me. I forgot about it as soon as the newscast ended. It was only when I arrived on campus that I learned that one of our students, along with her entire family, had been on the plane.
    The dead girl's name was Anitra Siddiqui, a second-year student who planned to go into nursing. It was a small college where most people either knew or knew of one another, and for the whole day the news of her death was the only topic of discussion. I tried to conduct my classes as usual, but the students were clearly pre-occupied, their thoughts with their dead classmate. Nobody would look at me or answer the questions I posed, so after a while I gave up and asked if anyone wanted to say a few words about the girl who had been killed. Several people raised their hands and stood to speak. A couple of girls wept quietly, using their fingers to wipe away the tears.
    Anitra Siddiqui had not been a student of mine. Later, when I saw her picture, I could not remember ever having seen her before. But like everybody else, I was transfixed by morbid curiosity, and I read the articles about her family that appeared in the newspaper.
    Her father was a surgeon, her mother a laboratory technician. Her brother attended a local university and had been taking computer science. By all accounts they were hard working, ambitious, civic-minded, and temperate in their habits. They had travelled to India because the father's remaining relatives were elderly and the children might never have gotten to meet them. He had left home many years ago, and until now never had an