He Let Me Wait for Nothing, Then Cried When I Left

After two years of waiting across distance, I was finally counting down the days until we could share a roof. Then the man courting me looked me in the eye, said something about steady work down at the docks where a man could disappear and keep his head down, and vanished into it.

For two years I lived for the half hour we got to talk each week.

Then, on a trip across the city into a borough I'd never set foot in, in a territory that belonged to people I didn't understand, I saw the man who was supposed to be loading crates at the waterfront.