the man who looks like a boy who grew up on cigarettes and whisky gets in his car and runs his hands like fingers across a map from his neck to his cheeks over his eyes and up his forehead, pushing under the baseball cap on his head, a tectonic plate and a rift now the hat on the passenger’s seat and his forehead on the steering wheel and he finally breathes out

meanwhile we are sitting in my car in the new dark, 10 pm in a lot behind a downtown law office and I am parked in two parking spaces next to your car because I do not usually do that but I thought I was dropping you off but now we’ve been here sweating with the ac turned up for thirty minutes

we have to talk loud to talk over the ac and I love you because we talk theoretical about a forty-five year-old man and his twenty-one year-old daughter and his twenty-six year-old mistress and because we laugh for way too long and because you look over at the man who looks like a boy who grew up on cigarettes that were half-burnt by the time they were handed to him and you say you hope he is doing alright and you love me because I say I think maybe we are talking so loudly he can hear us and if he can then he must be alright because our conversation is ridiculous and ridiculous is the kind of split-second cure for serious sadness in men who have quietly shattered into warring tectonic plates, and the ac says something back to us, and then we just sit there for a little while longer until the man has driven away and we have stopped sweating