Missing Footage

He was leaning against his car at the pump,

smelling of gasoline and cheap cologne,

and he called me by a nickname I haven't heard

since the year I tried to leave this town.

He laughed about a night in two-thousand-fourteen,

a broken window at the old bottling plant

and the way I supposedly ran through the weeds.

I stood there with the nozzle in my hand,

nodding and smiling like I could see it too.

But there’s a hole in my head where that night belongs,

a patch of static on a tape that’s been recorded over.

I don't know who that person was,

the one who broke things and ran through the dark,

but I felt his ghost shivering in my passenger seat

all the way home.