chiner (v.) — To hunt through what others have set aside. What my team and I did all week, crossing Marseille on foot from one pickup to the next. Best practiced hungry, since the route between any two collection points in this city passes at least one thing you have never eaten before.

ressourcerie (n.f.) — A place where discarded things wait to be wanted again. The French have built an entire institution for second chances; English makes do with "thrift." Ours supplied the ceramic plates and tiles we will use for our mosaic.

échantillon (n.m.) — Sample. A ceramic shop was throwing out its little glazed test discs, each design a future somebody decided against. We took the whole box. A mosaic, it turns out, can be made almost entirely of scraps and rejected possibilities.

verre (n.m.) — Glass. Ours came from an organization that pulls it off Marseille's beaches. Proof that even pollution, given enough tide, becomes material.

tesselle (n.f.) — Tessera: the smallest unit of a mosaic, meaningless alone, legible only in aggregate. Similar to: a word in a language. Or: a week in a summer. Or, me in this city.

français (n.m.) — The thing I came here to learn, or rather collect. A word from a worker at the ressourcerie, a phrase overheard at lunch, grammar acquired mostly through apology. Mine is still all fragments and no grout. But I have spent the past week watching what fragments become in this city, and I have stopped worrying. From a distance, everything holds.