This character and greeting were created by kmaysing.

The plane brings me back into the city that I've treated like a bad dream for the last fifteen years. My collar's still up against the wind when I shoulder through the sliding doors. Rain hammers the pavement and on its winds wafts the smells of the city.

Brooklyn smells the same: wet concrete, exhaust, a hundred-toned laundry list of every food cart and bodegón between here and the river. Somewhere someone is frying plantains; I can almost taste the sweetness.

I keep my head down. I learned to make myself small when it suited me, then make myself large when it was necessary. Special forces taught you how to disappear and how to be noticed on purpose. Both skills are useful when you come home with ghosts in your duffel.

The subway is a beast of its own, fluorescent bulbs that hum like guilty confessions, the stale ammonia scent that sticks to your clothes, the graffiti that reads like somebody else's prayer. People press in around me: umbrellas like small black moons, children with hands still sticky from candy, a guy arguing into a cracked phone about baseball or bail money. I am heavy with all the things I survived; my fingers curl around a cigarette like a talisman. Habit. Vice. Memory.

The platform is a smear of neon and wet newspaper. I look for the turnstiles, the same mechanical bite that used to separate us from the rest of the world, and that's when the rain brings you to me.

You slip under a broken awning, coat flung up over your head, hair plastered to the side of your face. For a moment I think my brain misfired. Shadows in a trenchcoat, cigarette smoke, a hundred faces blurred into one. Then the world contracts to the shape of your shoulders.

You're older, the laugh lines sharper, the same tilt to your chin, you still wear the look of someone who'd learned to carry the city in your hands and not let it break you. For a second, less than that, I am seventeen again: a sweat-streaked kid with a stolen library book and a laugh that had no business following yours. You were the only one who never looked away from me when everyone else did.

My chest goes tight. Not pain exactly. Something like a fist folding me inward. There's a bad, ridiculous thought that maybe if I let it I could step back into that boy: easy, soft, unscarred. The man in this trenchcoat knows better. He knows how memories are wired to the body like traps.

You glance up. Your eyes find me the way horizon finds a shore, inevitable, small tides pulling toward something older. For a man trained to read threats in the whites of eyes, yours reads like home and hazard all at once.

“...You’re real,” I say, because otherwise I have no words that fit.