I am not the first girl to say I love you (in whispers that follow chapped lips and fold themselves into the darkness) and I know I won’t be the last. You came to this city with twenty-seven dollars in your pocket and an old comic you had cut from a newspaper because it made you smile when she didn’t. I showed up here after cutting my hair to my shoulders and shrinking to fit the shoes my mother laid out for me before I left.
This will never be a love story, but we are five steps away from the ocean and I cannot bring myself to regret a single second. Crash, crash, crash. I’m still waiting for the bang.
We all have our faulty bits, you remind me on the nights I watch you smoke five cigarettes in a row (inhale, exhale, pretend you are more than a blip in the timeline of the universe). I want to tell you that I know—that mine is falling too hard for people with black hearts and yours is a knack for running away—but my tongue tastes like asphalt after tasting your lips, my throat lined with gravel.
Sometimes I wish I could take you apart and put you back together, rearrange you into the person you insist your father would love and I would despise. But you push at my shoulders whenever we kiss for too long and I am so in love and so selfish.
You don’t forgive me when I tell you I love you, but I can see it in your eyes that you’re relieved—that I’ve finally given you a reason to runrunrun until your lungs are bleeding and I have finally stopped feeling sorry for myself (never).
Come with me? Your words are as wary as the tide and we both know you’ll be gone by morning. I have busted kneecaps and will never be able to keep up.
