i was lost in the city that i used to know so well, around and around the same block, it was getting later and later and a simple cup coffee with old friends turned into some nightmare where i couldn’t find a phone to call you, to tell you i was so lost, walking into the same bodega asking the clerk behind the counter if i could use the cell phone he was talking into, and he kept smiling talking into the phone in his native language while taking condoms, batteries, cigarettes, cheap cigars off hooks from behind him and offering each in turn to me and i wasn’t smiling and he didn’t seem to mind and it was getting impossibly later into the early morning hours, over and over, until the doors of the bogeda were even locked and he no longer paid any attention to me, knocking on the other side of the bullet-proof glass.