At Honolulu’s Kawaikui Beach Park on July 27, 2016, I parked by a corroded old Dodge Neon, a car manufactured from the mid-1990s through 2005. Its windows were open, and a hand could be seen dropping cigarette ashes out the passenger side. Something protected against the weather with a black plastic bag was lashed to that side, and on the ground in back of the car stood something else, half-covered with a blue plastic tarpaulin.

When I got out of my car, I could see that the thing under the black bag was a wheelchair. The thing draped in blue was a gasoline-powered generator, purring loudly. Inside the car, close to each other in the back seat, two very old people reclined on a tangle of towels, smoking. In the state with America’s highest rate of homelessness (487 people per 100,000 in 2015), they were home.

I walked from the parking lot to the lawn.

After I took my picture I left. The Neon hadn’t moved, and I didn’t notice the girl, Miss Memento Mori, until I got back to my own home and inserted my memory card in its computer. In the two specialized vocabularies of computers and travel, a term for your own completed view of the girl on her brink near the Neon is destination.

Source: Cathy Bussewitz, “Hawaii struggles to deal with rising rate of homelessness,” Los Angeles Times 15 November 2015. http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-adna-hawaii-homeless-20151115-story.html