You handed me your memories from the passenger seat.
Together on long drives home,
we pondered the hushed musings of youth
that patter through heads and echo loudly
in the emptiness of half-formed identities.
Often the drive would be over, but the journey would continue,
the sound of the idling engine harmonizing
with the raucous beat of our young hearts.
Parked besides rows of sleeping houses
and wrapped in the security of a cloudless night,
my car's upholstery was saturated with tears of laughter and grief.
Rambling conversations, important only because they felt so,
shared in the privacy of a moving state,
a state neither here nor there, but in between.
We’d sit swimming in a broth of words
until life would tug open the car door,
spilling our fragile thoughts out onto cold cement,
and the chill of reality would seep into our bones,
and make us pull our ill-fitting egos closer to us,
their fragile unraveling threads the only means to stave off
the inconsolable state that marks the end of childhood.