Night Shift at the Dépanneur

Love Among the Lottery Tickets

The dépanneur on De L'Eglise at 2AM is church for insomniacs and the romantically destroyed. We congregate among the chips and cheap wine, finding salvation in 24-hour fluorescence. You're buying cigarettes you swore you'd quit. I'm buying milk I don't need.

The clerk watches us with the patience of someone who's seen every kind of midnight crisis. You count change in French, apologize in English. I pretend to read tabloid headlines while stealing glances at your shaking hands.

"Rough night?" I finally ask.

"Rough life," you answer, then laugh like it's a joke, though we both know it isn't.

We end up outside, sharing the stoop, passing your cigarettes back and forth like a calumet. You tell me about the apartment you can't sleep in anymore, how it echoes wrong since he left. I tell you about walking the city at night, how movement feels like progress even when you're going nowhere.

A drunk stumbles by, singing Leloup off-key. We applaud. He bows. The city continues its midnight theater.

"Same time tomorrow?" you ask when we part.

"Probably," I admit.

And we do meet again: not planned, just inevitable. Two bodies orbiting the same all-night beacon, finding comfort in shared insomnia and the reliable indifference of convenience store light.