It had been ages…years, since I had seen them. And if the movers had done their job properly, put all of the boxes away where I told them to…well, it may have been several more years before they ever surfaced again. That night…the day after…the memories flooded back while I flipped through a stack of old, faded photographs.
That summer was…an experience to say the least. First time on my own, college behind me, no job in front of me…I did what anyone else in my poor, aimless situation would do. I packed everything I owned in the back of my beat-up, old car…headed west…and broke down in some forgotten town in the middle of nowhere.
At least they had a diner, though the odds of surviving the plate of fried everything they pushed in front of me seemed rather slim. I didn’t pay her any attention at first…a local maybe, or if she was lucky, a fellow lost soul, just passing through. We made small talk until the waitress made us clear the counter for “paying customers”…even if the diner was just as deserted as the rest of the town.
Swept aside and forgotten to a booth in the back corner…we sat…for hours. The conversation was…sporadic, filled with long gaps, silences that should have been awkward…but weren’t. We spent as much time staring out the window at nothing as we did at each other. Sometime after the sun went down, after another long silence, she stood and left without a word…and I followed…all the way to the outskirts of town. We walked in silence, side by side, barely a glance between us…this wasn’t a night for…conversation.
I woke before she did…cramped in the backseat of an old, rusted out car…it was cold in the desert still, dark but starless now, just a faint slit of light peeked over the horizon. Two bodies huddled together, a makeshift blanket from our discarded clothes covered us, but it was the heat…skin on skin…that had kept us warm all night.
We both stirred when the the first rays of light hit the cracked windshield…dressed and sat on the hood of the car, no words were needed…just a lover’s embrace while the sun rose higher in the sky, warmed our bodies and cleared our heads.
Who was she…was it a chance encounter, one night together and nothing more or the start of some wild adventure, two young lovers…together against the world? Those questions…are perhaps best left to the past. The memories, the feelings…in some ways as clear as they had been that summer…in others, faded like the photographs I now kept boxed away.
One in particular caught my eye while I boxed them back up, not the photograph, the words scribbled across the back…they simply read “Your Lover, Always”
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