‘I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it.’
‘No.’
‘And sometimes I see you dead in it.’
‘That’s more likely.’

If I were a poet, that’s what I’d write about. People who worked in the middle of the night. Men who loaded trains, emergency room nurses with their gentle hands. Night clerks in hotels, cabdrivers on graveyard, waitresses in all-night coffee shops. They knew the world, how precious it was when a person remembered your name, the comfort of a rhetorical question, “How’s it going, how’s the kids?” They knew how long the night was. They knew the sound life made as it left. It rattled, like a slamming screen door in the wind. Night workers lived without illusions, they wiped dreams off counters, they loaded freight. They headed back to the airport for one last fare.

They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

She was extending a hand that I didn’t know how to take, so I broke its fingers with my silence.