(c) Forever (Or just for the summer) [PG]

Title: Forever (Or just for the summer)
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance? Realism. Romantic realism with idealist undertones and a sprinkling of angst.
Status: Oneshot, possible WIP.
Summary/Exerpt: We were kids, red-faced and youthful, with hopes and dreams far too big for our worn-soled boots.
Warnings: Character death, sexual themes.
Notes: Unbeta'd. The first thing I've written since December 12, 2008. (God, I can't believe that.) Keep that in mind when critiquing.

Forever (Or just for the summer.)

It was the summer of nineteen-something that my life changed. We were kids, red-faced and youthful, with hopes and dreams far too big for our worn-soled boots. Wind would whip lengthening hair into our faces and when we laughed out mouths spread so wide and open that our lips cracked and bled, our cheeks burned like the sunset. We had a car and we had each other and we had everything I’d saved in my life up until that point.

I took rolls and rolls of film, that summer. I don’t know how we could afford to live, with all the film I bought, but you just kept urging me on, rabid at the click of the shutter, the slow grind as I wound the film on and the chink as it clicked into place for the next shot. We never developed them. Why bother? You told me. Who needs memories when they’re young? Why live in the past when you have a future?

I think we scoured the whole country, that summer. We stripped it bare, dug deep and burrowed underneath its skin and held on for all we were worth, and no matter how hard it clawed or scratched, we were determined to never let go. The only light at the end of the tunnel we needed was the sparks in our eyes, blinding as the night sky when you’d laugh and cry and make love to me by the fireside. There’d be sand and rocks and dirt, and you just laughed free and open like the wind and smeared it further over my sensitive skin.

I never could imagine myself belonging to anyone else, because even when the red dust faded from my skin, you didn’t.

Pipe dreams, you used to tell me. Suburbia was a pipe dream. Reality was a pipe dream. I never found out the meaning until years later, but my mind conjured up pictures of factories, of machinery, of bouncing baby boys and pretty little girls and their mothers and fathers torn at the seams while they held it together for the kids. You’d light a cigarette and stare at the smouldering tip and make me swear to never let that happen to me. And when you kissed me and pressed it rough into my wrist, when I buried a hand so deep in your hair I felt it was going to fall away from your scalp in my hand – that was me saying yes.

Days stretched into weeks stretched into months, and we sprang from city to city to city. They laughed – they always have laughed at people like us – but you’d just kiss me too hard and hold my hand too tight and mutter obscenities like they were the sexiest words known to man, and I’d have a camera to my eye and click grind chink them into a negative for all eternity. They could mock us all they wanted, but when we were behind a lens, a guitar, the wheel of a car… we were invincible.

Nobody ever told me what happened to you. Muse today, gone tomorrow, they ripped you out of my life, and it was like in cartoons where you pull one thread and everything unravels. Sure, you weren’t the best-stitched seam, but you were mine and this life we’d sewn – we did it together. You and me, just us, forever (or just for the summer).

I still have the film, boxes and boxes of it. I never did get it developed, because who needs the past when they have a future? Photos won’t stick me back together. Photos won’t bring you back to life.

Photos won’t mend what they – or anyone – have done.

And so I burn it; dump the whole fucking box into a drum in my backyard and set it alight. It’s not summer – it’s chilly and there’ll be frost soon – but I sit too close and let myself sweat in my layers until I feel like I’ll faint. And when I peel the layers off, when I lay there under those same stars with our memories, with me and you, burning beside me, when I let my hands trail too gently for your liking down over skin you’ve branded time and time again – I can almost feel you there.