Middle of nowhere.
Cutoff shorts from highschool keeping my legs cool while my favorite red and black flannel keeps the top bits warmed up.
Walking through the mud I can feel my brown suede boots getting stuck and making noises. I turn to see if she's right behind me. It's pitch black outside. So dark and quiet it feels like we've walked to the edge of the universe.
I know she's there because I can hear her cursing. Looks like her shoes have sunk into the muck as well. She chalks the cleanliness of her feet up as a loss because she ends up catching up with me, moccasins in hand. I ditch my boots too. The second my feet hit the dirt a sense of relief washes over me.
We walk until the only sound we hear are the PBR's clanking around in my backpack and the cicadas that line the grass in the field. We both silently deem this the proper spot. We sit down on a blanket we've brought and crack open our beers. We sit for awhile not saying anything because we don't know where to start.
When the talking finally commences it comes out with such force that to stop it would be impossible. We talk about every trouble we've come across for the past few years. Why we're sad. What makes us happy. Why we're confused that we can't feel happy every day. We tell eachother to chin up, only to realize that sometimes doing so is impossible. We talk about our different coping mechanisms and try and explain to eachother that without hope there's no future for either one of us. All of this happens through tears and sometimes laughter and sometimes nothing at all.
We end this night of therapy with the act in which we came here to do.
We came here to edge of the universe to scream.
And that's just what we did.
We screamed so loud. We screamed out our cares, our fears, our insecurites.
Gone were the thoughts of lost loves, parental disputes, traumatizing childhood moments, if only for a moment.
Together, that night on the edge of the universe, we sat and watched our screams rise above us and be pushed away, up and towards the sky, so far away from us and the lives we wanted to live.
We slowly made our way through the dark, back to our blanket and things. We gathered our belongings and as we reached our car and the first bit of man made light we'd seen in hours we looked at each other and smiled.
Smiled for the hope of a better, less anxious, more loving future.
Two friends, going through the hard times only to reach the other side and experience the good.
Best friends. Getting by, not by themselves, but with the help of eachother.
