Toned and Summer Kissed

Skies was 9 hours away by train, but it was chance to wake up somewhere else and be a different person. Loy had my back those days when we were barely men as we watched the emptiness of the dry savanna roll by from the carriage window. We drank bad coffee to help recover from the cheap booze up in the diner cabin that ended just before dawn.

Mostly we hung out with a group of locals who didn’t do much, but they were good guys, gave us a place to stay and showed us around. That's how I met her.

They pretended to know her to get a laugh when she rejected me. It was on a bus back to Montrose one afternoon. She was impressed with my confidence and we talked almost all the way; oblivious to their intentions. 

I invited her to a party we’d planned and she turned up with a friend, by the end of the week we were hand-in-hand staring hopelessly in the depths of each other, intoxicated, toned and kissed by the summer.

Time has a way of drawing the curtain behind you; Loy and I went back home to become the people we are and I remember the skins we inhabited. The details of the good times and the acceptance we felt. But I can never remember her face.

Time has a way of making the past into stories we tell to the strangers we used to dream of becoming and its mists close in on the people we once were so we can never go back.