It was one of those nights, when you realize only drunk people care about your tattoos. In fact, it was the night the McDonald’s apple pie burned a hole through my gums. The night when I remembered how I used to write letters to God when I was little and leave them in the backyard on the branch of a tree.  And how I would go inside and sit on the couch, looking out the window, waiting for the letter to disappear, waiting for God to pick it up.

It was this night that I passed you as you sat at 2 am on the bench outside in front of the barbershop.  It didn’t matter how purple the light was or how perfect the crescent moon sat silently with it’s legs crossed.  Or how much the temperature reminded me of the thin, pale rainbow sheets that covered my twin bed when I was a child.  What mattered now, all of a sudden, was your shoes.  My eyes dropped and my pulse quickened and my mouth was so immediately dry I thought I would never swallow again.  Your silence had shouted at me for so long, and now you were in front of me and now it was just faces staring into faces and pulses jumping over reasons and sadness melting into skin.

You said, “Woah hey.”  And I said something I can’t quite remember but it resembled that same thing you said to me.  Then you said something funny.  ”How is the hermit crab?” you said.  This made me laugh so uncontrollably (on the inside of course),  I thought I would fall over the in the street and be sucked into the Earth forever and ever and I would spend eternity spinning around with that question in my head with your eyebrows and your smile forever mashed into my brain cells.  Since I didn’t want this to happen, especially right now, I said instead, “Well I bought him a friend.”  And you said, “He might have died if you didn’t.”  And I said, “Yes, they are very social creatures.”  And since all this really meant all of the things we didn’t say, I sat down on the bench next to you.