Dearest,

“I just locked us out of my house.”

“What?”

“I just locked us out of my house.”  Naturally, two miniscule nano-seconds after I closed the front door I realized I’d forgotten to slip the key in my pocket.  So, with my mother away for the evening, probably until some diabolical time like three in the morning, and my father on a business trip across the continental United States of Whatever-The-Heck-This-Country-Is, my boyfriend and I are locked out of my house.  Pleasant enough, I guess.  I just let the screen door slam back into its white frame and grab his hand. 

“Let’s go.”  We walk down the street, around the corner, and eventually all over my neighborhood, circling and circling and pretending we are in a maze until we find ourselves at the drug store.  We wander around until the manager starts stalking us with her beady little light blue eyes and leave, with nothing more in our pockets than we came with.  We aren’t juvenile delinquents.  We eventually end up at my blue good-for-pretty-much-nothing house and stop, hand in hand, halfway up the driveway.  I remembered my truck keys are in my pocket and dig them out, cursing myself for not putting a house key on my key ring.  I let go of his hand and unlock the cab door, swinging it wide. 

“Climb in,” I tell him.  He does, making the old bench seat creak, creak like the whole entire vehicle does, and I climb in after him. 

“Are we going somewhere?” he asks.

“No.  I broke the oil pump yesterday, remember?”  He nods and I lock the door.  It gets too hot and stuffy outside, so we pile back out onto the driveway.  I push myself into the bed this time, ripping a whole in the back of my jeans on a rusty metal edge; he gets in with much more grace than I could ever manage.  We lay there in silence, him next to me, me next to him.  Our hands aren’t toughing, and neither are our arms or legs or feet.  Nothing.  If I close my eyes I can’t even tell he is there, which is the strange thing about him.  He’s like a ghost when I have my eyes closed.  A big ghost. 

“What do you wish for most?” he ventures.  I don’t take any time to answer.

“I want all this to be over, to be in a field out in the middle of absolutely nowhere, not another soul around for miles and miles and …” I wait.  “And I want to be so free that my heart can’t take it and I die.”