Those nights we shared a bottle of something pilfered and did not look at each other; we looked at the river, and the truths and lies were not kind, but terrible. At times, after one of us had finished speaking, there would be a silence so deep and hurt that the only sound was the suck of our lips pulling smoke in through our filters and pushing it back out into the night. We had to say what we had to say, stories about how lost and hopeless and mean we felt, and you could trace every story back to our families, and if you poked around a little in those families you’d find our fathers, men
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