we tried hard to stand it. we were barely human. we were bodies stacked with pain. we never said sorry,
didn’t wanna. you were always drunk
& sad & too far gone for that. I was
terrible & I didn’t care about being better.
but now you’re standing in my bedroom.
now you’re scared & you say you
wanna get into heaven. you wanna stand in some form of light that isn’t filtered through clouds of crude smoke.
good luck, & who knows, maybe god
will forgive us for all of this. the stones
we threw, the ankles we bit, the people
we kissed. showing up at the gates
with our tails between our legs. starved & mad, two dogs who missed
their last meal, licking our wounds & itching for a fair fight.
there so much to get mad about. go ahead pick something. imagine if it helped. imagine if mattered. I didn’t cry when you left. I just circled ‘round the block & waited for you to come back. because you always do. because I know how this goes. we pretend we aren’t the same & then we realize we are & we pretend we don’t care. we need each other & that’s all we do.
it’s crazy the things you do for a friend. it’s crazy the way you’ll act for love.
Alone & afraid are mostly
the same thing. We were both.
We were both here. Your face shone
the first safe beacon I had ever seen.
This particular McDonald’s is a liminal space, connected to multiple dimensions and timelines like spaghetti tangled around a meatball.
Dude and his wife have been finding and losing each other for centuries.
If you go inside next Thursday it’ll be 1993 and you can watch them meet.
It’s very romantic, but quite crowded, due to three hundred years’ worth of mildly curious time travelers showing up.
Also they run out of Big Mac sauce.
Do not go inside.
You will probably trip over the briefcase of a businessman from 2067 and get bitten by someone’s poorly-behaved pet robot archaeopteryx, and the intrepid explorer from 1672 in a steampunk dimension will whap you over the head with her umbrella right when he says his first words to her, and your Big Mac won’t have any special sauce.
Also there’s a small but nonzero risk that you’ll step out into the Upper Cretaceous and be eaten by a confused adolescent T-rex that really only wanted your soft-serve ice cream, but isn’t complaining about the rest of you.
Anyway, the guy in the other window has been living in the McDonald’s for six years straight, after his home dimension was over run by parasitic space wasps.
He’d leave, but every time he tries he comes out into either a Category 4 hurricane or the opening scene of the Star Wars Holiday Special.
He’s got his own secret stash of the Big Mac sauce.
daverosed 