Bradley Earle Hoge, Branches Over Water
The Long Goodbye
Calla Smith
I leaned into the rush and thrill of the cold wind on my skin as we flew over the endless road to nowhere, the harsh glare of the city lights behind us. For a brief moment, I was the steady roll of the rubber tires, and the cold curtain of rain. I was wild and alive and finally free in the beauty of movement over all that space and time.
But eventually the rain forced us to stop and take shelter against the patient trunk of a tree, the leaves just thick enough to keep us dry. The darkness of the jungle surrounded us, and I felt the short, coarse shadow of a beard rough against my cheek as you put your arms around me. You still believed that you could protect me. I didn’t have the heart to tell you that you couldn’t, not anymore.
We find shelter under a willow tree. It seems like we are alone in the world there. You put down a blanket to cover the wet ground, and I thought that with so much rain you wouldn’t notice if I was crying, but of course you did, and that just made everything worse, and my body was racked with sobs that I could no longer control.
“We could go back,” you said, but we couldn’t. There was no way to turn back time and find ourselves in the full glory of that first summer we spent together, our skin golden and smiles frozen. Even then I had known I never wanted those long hot days to end. Even now I didn’t want to go anywhere, I just wanted to stay where we were, the tree branches sheltering us from the rain forever, alone except for the occasional car that sped past on the road.
I could feel the tension in your body as you held me and tried to stop your own tears from coming. I could feel it in the way your heartbeat and your breath came in short quick stabs that penetrated the cold, wet air around us. I must have fallen asleep at some point from the exhaustion of the trip and the pain of emotions streaking through my body.
I woke up as the sun rose. The rain had stopped, and you were still asleep but shook yourself awake when I started to stir. We stood up, stretched out our legs, and got back on the motorcycle, going farther and farther away from where we had come from, where it had all started and we had been happy and free once, so long ago that it felt like another lifetime.
I was the one who had asked you to take me on this journey and I knew that eventually we would arrive back at my small, cold hometown where my parent’s house would still smell of mothballs and dust. You would have to make the trip back on your own. That was just the way things were. The only thing that was left was to hold onto you tightly, so I didn’t fall off onto the hard, punishing asphalt.
Calla Smith
I leaned into the rush and thrill of the cold wind on my skin as we flew over the endless road to nowhere, the harsh glare of the city lights behind us. For a brief moment, I was the steady roll of the rubber tires, and the cold curtain of rain. I was wild and alive and finally free in the beauty of movement over all that space and time.
But eventually the rain forced us to stop and take shelter against the patient trunk of a tree, the leaves just thick enough to keep us dry. The darkness of the jungle surrounded us, and I felt the short, coarse shadow of a beard rough against my cheek as you put your arms around me. You still believed that you could protect me. I didn’t have the heart to tell you that you couldn’t, not anymore.
We find shelter under a willow tree. It seems like we are alone in the world there. You put down a blanket to cover the wet ground, and I thought that with so much rain you wouldn’t notice if I was crying, but of course you did, and that just made everything worse, and my body was racked with sobs that I could no longer control.
“We could go back,” you said, but we couldn’t. There was no way to turn back time and find ourselves in the full glory of that first summer we spent together, our skin golden and smiles frozen. Even then I had known I never wanted those long hot days to end. Even now I didn’t want to go anywhere, I just wanted to stay where we were, the tree branches sheltering us from the rain forever, alone except for the occasional car that sped past on the road.
I could feel the tension in your body as you held me and tried to stop your own tears from coming. I could feel it in the way your heartbeat and your breath came in short quick stabs that penetrated the cold, wet air around us. I must have fallen asleep at some point from the exhaustion of the trip and the pain of emotions streaking through my body.
I woke up as the sun rose. The rain had stopped, and you were still asleep but shook yourself awake when I started to stir. We stood up, stretched out our legs, and got back on the motorcycle, going farther and farther away from where we had come from, where it had all started and we had been happy and free once, so long ago that it felt like another lifetime.
I was the one who had asked you to take me on this journey and I knew that eventually we would arrive back at my small, cold hometown where my parent’s house would still smell of mothballs and dust. You would have to make the trip back on your own. That was just the way things were. The only thing that was left was to hold onto you tightly, so I didn’t fall off onto the hard, punishing asphalt.