Better Days, With Nothing To Blame On Youth

The air is cool and our smoke is curling up around this conversation we never meant to have. We haven’t been drinking, but we’re a little bit drunk on youth- it’s strong stuff. And it makes us move beyond our politics, past making caustic jokes, through wishing we could stop talking and just kiss. So, here we are, feeling immaculate and isolated. The cigarettes hardly help at all, now I think of it. If the world was a mountain, we’d be standing alone on the summit.

The stone wall is something good to hold onto, strong against our backs- concrete, earthbound. We are far out of our depth now, and we are afraid.

You ask first, but I admit that I was about to anyways. And I don’t even think to love how you look so puzzled that you’ve actually said it- I’ve never been so strangely detached.

Answers come slowly, but they come. Our words don’t float away like balloons, but tangle into the smoke and hang in the air, reluctant to go.

I say, “I’m not afraid of much. Just going home, and waking up, and finding out that the future doesn’t matter either,” and you say, “Sometimes I think it would be easiest to say I’m afraid of everything.” I guess I don’t really see the difference.

You say, “Half the time this feels like a wonderland, and the other half, as steady as hell.” I see the difference there.

I say, “I always said those things don’t matter. Does any of what we care about matter, either?” You flick your cigarette to the ground and shrug. That’s answer enough, no question.

The air is cool, and aside from the dead light of the streetlight and two little orange-red pinpoints on the ground, the night is dark. Any other time, you would have kissed me by now, but we went through that place like death valley.

You say, “Sometimes I wish it would always be as steady as hell.”
I say, “Yeah. This wonderland always turns out to be too much.”

We go back inside.