This is a picture I did not take

of a young man wearing Carhartts, riding a train, talking on his cell-phone to a faraway friend about a photograph (which he held in his hand) that had just been found "inside a book by Isabel Allende" in a second-hand bookstore in Santa Cruz, which was a photo of his faraway friend, standing with a woman in "a woodland setting." The friend asked questions about the photo, to which Carhartts replied, "her hair's curlier than yours" and "no, she's not big boned" while looking at the photograph and trying to jog his friend's memory ("it's definitely the East Coast"), which apparently wasn't taking cues, even though visual proof of a fraction of a second of his life had lived for who knows how long inside a book in a bookstore, and was now travelling by train, north to San Francisco.