Forever would not be enough, and now was all I had.

It was San Jose, I think — maybe Oakland, though. The memories blur together so badly in the autumn. Ghost images of one city lay across the next like an incomplete transition. We run and run and run, chasing the future through night laced with cigarette smoke and the sounds of broken guitars, one place to the next and the last is another casualty of our shadows.

She’s asleep on the hotel bed, her mascara tracing haunted angles on her cheeks. Another night of us against the world, three empty bottles of wine and a game of tag in the park outside the school, and as she pressed her naked warmth against mine in the cool night air and whispered the last night’s dreams in my ear, and I couldn’t shut out the music playing from the apartment nearby:

“when you say now
well when exactly do you mean?
for i’ve already waited too long
and all my hope is gone”

The city lights steal in through the open window and crawl across her body, greedy fingers teasing porcelain skin. I light another cigarette and time races forward and back as I watch her breathing, watching over her, and as her chest rises and falls steadily, naked breasts gleaming with soft dawn sweat, I know that it’s time to go again. She’ll rise, sleepyhead good morning and the taste of dreams on her tongue to mine, and then we’re off again to parts unknown, her hand in mine and the dust and brine of a new country on our clothes.

And it was somewhere in California that I realized my legs would never tire while I was running with her.

In time, we would forget why we left in the first place; eventually, even where we started would fade. This was our adventure, the rediscovery of the world that the world itself had forgotten, the remaking of anywhere and everywhere into new, home without an anchor, and the whole of the earth was ours to remake as we wished.