"come get briefly lost with me," she says, and that's the hook, isn't it? the one that gets you right around the rib cage, pulls with every beat of your heart. i'm lacing my boots over socks soaked in lake water and we're off despite the threat of blistered skin. i think of all the nooks, the secret, dark places i've found, drawn into their centers as the smell of damp earth urges us forward. the sounds of the beach grow faint in our wake, bread crums of noise calling to us from the edges of perception. we go deeper, deeper, down. alone. your hand in mine through twisted pines. "are we lost yet?" i whisper, not wanting to disturb the pulse of life around us with human voices. she shakes her head so we keep walking, splashing through narrow brooks, until there are no more voices, just hands, greedily tearing at each other.

there will be marks, and blood, and none of it matters because there's no one around to watch us with eyes too hungry, too ready to assert their judgmental taxonomy, the are-they-or-aren't-they, and it doesn't matter. afterwards, it doesn't matter, because she is just a woman and i am but a man. the only overlap is what we do with our hands. this dance, this... dangerous courtship. i'm a little boy in the woods again, hiding from the darkness. they're calling our names. we hear them, fix ourselves, put each other back together. kick off our shoes and dive into the water, let the falls sweep the magic back to some place undetected. it never existed, we never existed, until the next time.

summer is ending soon. there's a bitterness to packing my bags, to scribing my travels into a sketchbook, like biting into a cucumber left wild too long, the kiss of a 9v battery on the tongue. when the leaves change, when the distance lays between us, you won't even remember my name. but there are songs about us, you see, written like prophecies long ago. looking at you in the rearview, i'll be humming along.