Measure Twice

I got out of the car.

The door chunked shut like a gavel. Night air. A smell I will not romanticize. My shoes on grit. The hundred yards looked longer on foot, the way every distance does when you have decided to spend it. I did not look back at the car. Looking back is how you stay a man in a seat.

I walked toward the cheap gold light. I walked like a customer, because customers are allowed. The hoodie watched me come. I felt my face arrange itself into the office smile, the one James gets on Monday, the one Luis got in a mirror before the driveway, the one that says I am a person with a reason.

I had a reason. It was not a basement. It was not a faucet. It was not a chair.

It was the failure of a park, and the lie of television, and the hunger that had not been spent so much as postponed, and a Monday that would ask how the weekend was, and a mouth that was already practicing same old.

I kept walking. The corner got closer. The lamp made a stage out of cracked concrete. I was off the seat. I was in the night. I was a man who had gotten out of the car, which is the only measurement that counts once the engine has ticked itself quiet.