We’re on the fourteenth or so minute of walking downtown, and that means downtown is only another three minutes away. There are people in calm yards doing calm post-work things such as mowing or porch-sitting and they’ll view our rapid strolls and think something like young people. Even though they could be young again if they just chose to remember their old eyes.

We both wear faded jeans and ripped sneakers, which look great with the backdrop of sidewalk, and now we’re already sitting in the glittery red and silver booth near the back of Smokey Row, complaining over having nothing to do. 

We just wish someone would do something fun, or that something tragic from the dramatic songs we listen to would occur, but we don’t really want that, we want the ice cream I just bought us. We want the fun to exist and we don’t get that we’re producing it right now. 

This is everyday of life at 16, and it’s something that only kids with artistic interests, strangled by prairie grass in the mid-west, can understand.

You will talk of things like coffee and bigger places and the way things won’t suck someday, even though this really doesn’t suck that bad now, we just don’t know it. We don’t know what really sucks. 

You’re about to jump out of the tree in the center of town, and some old woman who’d still attempt to put nickels in phone booths if she spent anytime near phone booths is looking nervous.

I laugh, because I want you to make her nervous, and I’m happy as you’re jumping and falling, because I know your young bones are strong (even though that one knee is a little fucked up from track practice) and you’ll be fine, and this grandma can go on with her worrying elsewhere. 

You land and tumble into orange and yellow and brown leaves, and lay there for a bit. I dropkick my coffee cup and fall down next to you, because this is what love looks like from really far away.