Cargo Pants Consultation

There’s a young man in a retail uniform buying a hot dog on the corner and his best friend is watching my hand as it moves across his cheeks just loudly enough for us to hear. This man identifies himself as my father, a true friend in this place, removed from the city, in these wild woods, like a shadow in my peripheral vision. At that moment, I am an unpaved laughter killed by a city, an internet buddy from millions of years hence fluent in languages we can’t imagine, encased in a matrix older than the words we use for an act of sacrificial generosity.