"I am homesick."

The girl paused in the middle of her trigonometric equations, thought for a moment, then under the mass of pi fractions and cosecants wrote bluntly: I Am Homesick. She looked at these three words. They seemed to her a small admission of guilt. Surprised, she wondered what had come over her to write a statement that, in context, was absurd--in actuality she was home, luxuriating in idyllic Santa Cruz-- chill, hippy-run Santa Cruz, the point on the map which had all her life represented her hometown.

Then,-

(In her mind's eye) a wide-angle panorama of drastic and dark mountains underscoring toothily the bronze, dawning sky--voluptuous clouds slothed over these mountains with hypnotizing rhythm; a slow, single, continuous heartbeat. Rusty boulders with pock-marked faces look up at these clouds, a light darkness moving across their bulky bodies in abstract patches. Pocket holds and sharp edges grow slight shadows which blacken and harden as the sun journeys from one side of the valley to the other, then melt back into the crisp granite as light trickles from the air and the day gives way to the dawn of night. Black poptarts with legs swinging chalkbags abandon a chiseled, handsome, stoney face, bobbing between boulders as they are born by a well-worn path from a world of failed projects and glorious ascents to an unwilling, inferior reality. The thrumming, nastalgic music of the cozy cafe trailed off and a sigh escaped someone's lips to mingle with the steam of a mug of dark roast coffee.

My heart twinged. Bishop was far away.