When You Were Young You Ate at KFC

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When you were young there was nothing like KFC on New Year’s Eve— you ate as though trying to locate god in the cardboard behind the store up the street. The longing alone could tip you into the ocean you’d wake with another stranger on your couch, his air slowly becoming your air, as all things become one thing in time. And sometimes your city forgets which city it is—all of the places you’ve lived smell mostly the same because thrift store books smell mostly the same. Stick your nose in a random paperback: you’ll smell the future, where the lonely old still ask about love,

tell you about life before the divorce and after, what evenings are like now: warm light on the red brick school, absence when the sun goes away. It’s sentimental because it isn’t. You are young and divorced yourself. You are just two humans smelling books in thrift stores as though you could uncover all of the ways you’ve failed old lovers or find god between the pages of a conversation that isn’t really a conversation, more of a prayer, like dear god we’re all fucked up, help us to unfuck one another, unfuck us in the fullness of time.