The Night Before My Best Friend Died-Double Exposure

I don’t drink coffee.

I remembered how

You said this

at the grocery store one night,

in the aisle where they sold dried mango, you told me you wanted to talk about the time

when we had sat on the bench outside for hours,

and I read and you thought about how the night sky could carry silence,

and the people, and the car lights, and the sweetness, and

how it tasted, the mango lingering, and

the stupidity of it all,

how in all of the places in the world we chose to end up here

and how I thought it seemed poetic,

and you thought it was a musical,

but we both were right,

because this would never make it to a mantel, we knew,

that this would become the page.

Then, you chuckled a bird whistle laugh,

and you reached for the cup at your sides,

you paused, squinting at the shopping carts, raising the cup to your lips,

drawing a sip beyond the smoke beading of the rim and

shortly after spitting the contents across the concrete, I learned how

it was perfect.

You hated coffee.