Her Last Day in Hiroshima

The white gloved hands of the taxi driver.
The barefoot school.
Perfect cassis gelato.
Sardine and scallion sushi.
Honwara Elementary School - almost completely destroyed by the A-bomb - now a Peace Museum full of: paper cranes; scratched and cracked walls like Cy Twombly paintings; glass, button, wood, buddha, decorative, ceramic and cloth artifacts in vitrines; rusty switchboards; scarred stairs. When she walks outside of the dark and thick interior, she is blinded by the late July sun beating down on the new white school surrounded by palm trees and sculptures.
The Peace Park full of memorials, a fallen sky, bones, ashes, between rivers once full of corpses.
Guthrie dressing up as a girl and dancing like a ballerina before she left to go make pictures.
Harper excited to be going home, for water play on her last day of Japanese school.
The Chinese Parasol tree with big big leaves.
The survivor's notebook of yellowed pages covered with a text she can not read.
The library with Richard Rhodes' collection - books he donated.
Packing tea cups, passports, airplane snacks, cameras and a thick roll of rubbings/frottages.

She knows she will be back in Hiroshima some day but today feels like the end of something, thick with finality. She has held back sobs all day. This city has loved her and she loves it back. Hiroshima will never be finished or resolved. It is a constant and eternal place. She could make art here forever.