Men think with their minds, women think with their hearts. That’s what a friend of mine used to say, and I used to believe him. We looked out at all the beautiful, dark-skinned flacas strolling up and down Broad St,, with their boots shorts and spaghetti straps and Dominican flags painted on their cheeks, banners and streamers waving everywhere, the smell of roasted meat and Spanish rice thick in the air, and I knew that the welling in my chest and the smile on my face didn’t have a damn thing to do with my mind. But who was I to say.

Heart, mind. Mind, heart. Of course our hearts don’t feel. Then why do they hurt so good? Why did my ex double over and clutch her chest when I told her we can still be together, I’ll just look at you differently? Why did she keep saying my chest hurts, I can feel my heart breaking? The heart and the mind, man.

That was the same one who had two kids at twenty two and a star around her belly button that the second one gave her. I give her hell ‘cuz she gave me stretch marks, she used to say. But she loved her kids, even she was worried about her son becoming a faggot – a concern that brought her very close to tears once – because he was growing up around only women and his voice was high and and soft and he was a real nice boy, gentile to the touch, and a little bougie.

He was a kid that needed a man around, in the words of his mother. She used to ask me to hang with him, watch the games and talk to him and all that, try to get him to like basketball and stop watching My Little Pony. His mom got her nails done, changed outfits five times before leaving the house, had a weave or a perm most of the time, used to get down in the living room to that bullshit they play on Hot 106 and his sister was the cutest damn thing you ever saw, so what did you expect? He was a lady’s man. A man of women, women who needed their little man to to become a man, a man who was hard and who didn’t g.a.f., who was cold and about his money and who hit first, or at least harder, and who would hit his girl if she got an attitude, maybe just a little bop, or a big one, but hey, that was Kingstree. That’s what men did.

Last I saw he was still a nice boy with a shy smile, skinny and tall like his mother, rocking a polo that was a little too small.

Haven’t heard a peep from her in over two years now that I think about it. Probably won’t either. Not that I want to, it’s just weird to think that there was a time when we talked every day, when I knew her in and out, and now there’s just a girl out there who looks like her, a girl I used to know to the bone that I’ll never see again, who has probably already changed so much that we wouldn’t have anything to talk about.