I watched your figure fade further into obscurity, every road sign passed like a lock on a door I never wanted to close. But it creaked and crawled on its hinges as my tires dragged away. A low roar settled under the car, as it roamed across the crumbling stone that hadn’t seen a maintenance crew since the early 1900s. My hands shook on the steering wheel and if i focused hard enough, I could feel your presence getting weaker. I knew that the moment, our final moment, would be coming soon. We had said our last goodbye, but I couldn’t help reminding myself that the real end would come when I had truly left you behind. The moment when I knew you would go on living and my life would go on, but not together. Not like we had been for every year of our never-ending childhood.

Time went on and each mile reminded me of the distance between us. I watched the traffic growing around me; part of me expected to see you in amongst them. A friend of a friend at least. Some memory of the town I was storing away in my mind, waiting to forget. All I saw were strangers and people who I might’ve known if I was someone else. It was a another persons world, their life and their people. My loneliness settled in to the passengers side and sealed the window to the outside. There was an odd sense of comfort in that.

A sign readied itself for my line of sight and I prepared to read. Nebraska. It was a state line. I wish I could say I screamed in joy or cried out for home, but the only feeling left was absence. The absence of the people I had spent my whole life with. Absence of familiarity and knowledge. And above all else, and absence of any real answer as to how this made me feel. I was looking my future in the eye with all the excitement of a newsman on his 100th show. Detachment flooded my senses and I drove further away from the past into a present I didn’t understand in the slightest. I hoped that soon I would know whether that thought was incredible or the most terrifying fate imaginable.