Let’s Just Go

we were children,

our knees grass-burned,

mouths sugared with soda,

time whole,

like glass unbroken on the sidewalk.

the world was wide then,

summer afternoons stretched

like the endless field behind the houses,

and we thought nothing could touch us.

then a door opened.

a stranger’s smile too wide,

his hands buried deep in his pockets,

his voice a hook cast into our laughter.

inside, the curtains swallowed the sun.

the air was stale,

as if the room itself knew shame.

and our voices—

the same ones that once shouted goals across lawns—

went silent,

locked in our throats like safes with missing codes.

i wanted to move.

you wanted to move.

but our bodies froze,

as if the floor had nailed us down.

and then—

you whispered it, barely sound at all,

“let’s just go.”

three words,

a broken prayer.

but we didn’t.

we couldn’t.

and time, that perfect glass,

shattered in our hands.

after,

we walked home with ghosts on our shoulders,

our mouths still sealed,

our steps heavy as stones dropped in water.

we built masks out of new laughs,

wore them down hallways lined with lockers,

passing each other like strangers

who used to share the same skin.

we were planets pulled apart,

one burning too hot in crowded rooms,

the other freezing in silence,

each pretending distance was protection.

but every night,

the memory scraped against the inside of my skull,

a claw on glass.

the body remembers

what the mouth refuses to name.

i saw it in your eyes, too—

the flinch in your laugh,

the way your hands trembled

when no one was looking.

we were mirrors cracked down the middle,

each of us afraid

to admit the reflection was ours.

the years of fracture stretched,

silent but screaming.

i shut you out—

my fear sharper than your need.

i thought burying it would save me.

i thought silence was survival.

i thought wrong.

you shouted louder in crowded rooms,

i drowned quieter in bottles.

you tried to laugh yourself clean,

i tried to bleed myself numb.

two strategies for the same war,

neither of us winning.

and when you reached out,

when your eyes begged me to share the weight,

i built higher walls.

i told myself i was strong

for refusing to remember.

i told myself forgetting

was a kind of mercy.

but silence is not mercy.

it is a weight that multiplies.

and the further we drifted,

the louder it became—

an echo chamber with no exit.

the call came years later.

your name,

followed by the word gone.

the air around me collapsed.

my body folded like paper in fire.

i drank again,

but this time the bottle was bottomless.

i broke myself open,

until the truth spilled out

like blood i had been keeping too long.

in the sterile glow of a hospital light,

i said it out loud.

each word a blade,

each sentence a scar reopening.

confession isn’t freedom—

it’s an avalanche.

avalanche.

and still,

it did not bring you back.

but dawn came anyway.

the river carried the city on its back,

the sky turned pink and forgiving,

and i sat there,

scarred, shaking, breathing.

i spoke to no one,

to everyone,

to you, maybe.

we were children.

children.

the blame was never ours.

the silence was.

the silence was.

and now i walk with ghosts beside me.

their hands brush mine in crowded streets.

their voices return in the hiss of trains,

the slam of lockers,

the click of a pen.

i have learned this:

trauma is not a moment,

it is a season that never ends.

you carry it like winter in your chest,

a frost that even summer cannot melt.

still, i breathe.

i rise with mornings.

i build a life in spite of the wreckage.

i carry the river inside me,

its steady reminder that time moves forward

even when we stay broken.

and some nights,

when the silence is heavy enough to crush me,

i hear you again.

your voice,

trembling, human, alive—

“let’s just go.”

and this time,

i answer:

we did.

we went.

but we never came back whole.