Let’s Get Out of Here, Just You And Me

Let’s get out of here, just you and me. I don’t need the promise of tomorrow and yesterday tastes bitter in my mouth. I want to watch the sun rise over a landscape that breaks into all the things I never thought I’d see; all the things I was too afraid to reach for. We’ll take your car and I’ll man the radio, I’ll play the soundtrack of my life and you’ll smile like you don’t know. We can chase the memory of passion lost, a trail growing colder with every mile we leave behind.

Let’s ditch this town, this tired collection of haphazard streets and lawns built on haste and disinterest. I imagine blue skies and sweet air that isn’t heavy with all the choices we’ve both made, the words we never should have said, and pretend, for a minute, that the grass really might be greener. I want to grab your hand and leave the path we’ve started down, I want to scream fuck it all into the bleeding sun and give it all up. I want to take for granted everything I have with you and recapture the uncertainty.

Let’s stay up late and watch the stars move in tandem with the moon.  We’ll remember younger days of whispered promises on shooting sparks in the void and the wild hope of a tomorrow that might never come. We’ll laugh at the sheer enormity of everything we can’t see and feel free in the face of all the things we could never hope to understand. We’ll pretend we’re not afraid and fall asleep as the moon dies and the stars sputter like the dreams we built in the dark, forgotten under the press of the sun.

Let’s make promises we can’t keep. They taste the sweetest as they roll off our eager tongues, like the temporary pleasure of a stolen candy and forgotten just as quickly. I want to pretend for a few hours more that this might last longer than a few hundred, uncounted heart beats. I want to sit here, hands clasped and sweaty, and pretend for just one second more that this might mean something. Something more substantial than time long lost and passed.

Let’s turn ourselves into something we’re not. I’ll be that girl the broken slivers of me once dreamed of being and you can pretend you’re everything I thought I wanted. We can build ourselves using the pieces others left behind; all those lofty ideals and unrealistic gems of plastic brilliance. A fair and convincing façade from across the room, just don’t get too close or you’ll see the cracks in the warped glass. We’ll be actors in a play that has no audience aside from our two silly hearts that are so damn set on ruining the lines. You’ll say you love me and I’ll smile and say ‘I know.’

Let’s say goodbye. And this time we’ll mean it, I swear. When we hug, our bodies disjointed and graceless as they collide in a mockery of the passion they once possessed, we’ll force our smiles and our words will slither all across our teeth. I’ll turn to leave and you’ll stand at your door, the one that was always hard to cross, and I won’t turn and you won’t wait. The door will click closed and I’ll get into my car and drive away. The anticlimactic ending to a tired song that I’d long forgotten the words to, but a part of me will always remember the chorus.

Let’s get out of here, just you and me.