The Denouement

"I tried to love but you know I'd never stay. I'd never stay. But if I OD, I want you to OD right beside me, I want you to follow right behind me. I want you to hold me while I'm smiling, while I'm dying. And if you know me when I go missing, you know where to find me" - "Faith" by The Weeknd. 

Driving the desolute stretch of highway between Blue River and Tête Jaune Cache, I think only of you. Only of this time last year. Of how I made this same journey alone. Desperately clinging to my sobriety and videochatting you from cheap roadside motels, listening to you play me guitar, dreaming of meadows and eventually my lips against your warm skin.

As we driving further north, the landscape becomes more barren, the land more inhospitable. The mountains loom against a grey foreboding sky, storms always on the horizon. "Where are we even going?" he asks, as we drive further and further into the Rockies, the weather matching my mood. "Why don't we go somewhere warm?"

But you see, I am learning how not to love you. And it's here, with the miles of empty highway stretching into forest and the rest stops with the bitter winds, our jackets pulled tight to our throats as we cough on the thick smoke we inhale from the tinfoil we pass back and forth, it's here that I can do that. In the tiny tiny towns where no one knows our names, where no one will remember us once we are gone, I can pretend to be someone else altogether.

High, sprawled out on the scratchy motel quilt, some cable TV movie droning on in the background, we talk about our childhoods, all the things we lost. In the beginning we were both woodland creatures, soft before we were hunted, now doing what needs to be done to survive. On the road, we are wild beasts, brought together by fate, homesick for places we cannot return. But there are so many moments of tenderness between us as we attempt egress, the world razor sharp at our backs. I am running from the memory of a girl who loved me but not enough and him from a family who didn't love him at all. I run my fingertips over the cigarette burn scars on his forearms, he presses his gently against my still swollen lip. We fall asleep in a pile of tangled limbs and wake to newly fallen snow. We have no future but we drive north anyways.