In this topography where convenience is sold en masse, past the carwash, and past the big rectangle-ish block of building that has a thrift shop where you got a yellow jacket that will brave a hurricane for an hour before succumbing,
past the fastfood one where they messed up your order, or fastfood two that had a beautiful cashier who made you briefly forget your order, or fastfood three where for less than two dollars you could have a dinner, and an additional dollar a drink,
Past the lamp posts and vrooming cars and a car wash that has seen better days, where a car skidded by you as if in warning,
Past the liquor store where they did not card you and the barbershop where your friend went, your tall Sudanese friend who gets his hair clipped in a sea of Spanish music and other patrons who seem to always come here because they greet the barbers like you would at family functions, at happy family functions, and they nod at you when eye contact is made as if to say I see you, I see your worth
Past all this sprawls the cemetery, tablets etched on the rolling ridges whose edges you skirt with your friend, musing on the expanse of being and the aches of the heart. This summer, like the last, has found you two together again in a city that is as strange as it is familiar, how to say the feeling of the cash-only Chinese cuisine across the barbershop, or the pay by tap Mexican cuisine across it, or the heapy portions of Jamaican chicken two doors down? How to say the trip to the supermarket, recipes sought on the web and realized in a kitchen whose basement you’ve rented monthly, watching the setting sky from the porch while the twin daughters of the Filipino family prance inside.
On the weekend, hot sun that crackles in the pavement, you argue about how best to go to the T. The bus may arrive, but if it does not (and it does not), you prefer biking and he prefers walking. Fine, you say, walk. Fine, he says, bike. You order a chimichanga with a beverage that always reminds you of your childhood, of simple pleasures like that of taste, and you enjoy the time you save while your friend defiantly departs on his pilgrimage. You sit in the park, gloating inside, but the hollowness of the park (with a solitary bench, no shade and sporadic dog excretions on the sorry patch of grass) bites away at you. Soon you wrap up your half-finished meal up and you head to the bike dock (punch code in, release bike, get on it). Soon you have caught up with your friend just before the station and you sit at a bench, under a blast from the gigantic fans that swirl by the tracks. How was the bike ride, he asks. Good, how was walking? Good.
On the screen, in yellow dots, the waiting time for the metro to Oak Grove reads 7 minutes.