One day we’ll say Fuck It and we’ll leave. It will start with those two words, forced out of our mouths by the restlessness built under our skin after years of sitting still, sitting idle while our potential lies crumpled in the front seat and our dreams stay curled around the steering wheel of your mum’s old Subaru, keeping it warm for us. Our bags have been packed for years now, with all the necessary equipment to keep us surviving, but we’ll forget them, anyway. We’ll leave, anyway.

The car will run for 132 kilometres before we’ve passed enough distance to slow our momentum, our bladders so fit to burst even aiming for the empty Coke cans rattling in the leg space seems tempting. We’ll stop just long enough to refuel, but then we’ll be off again like mice through a sewer grate, spinning westbound and down, high like 16 and flying ever onward. The people in each town we pass will only notice the sparks that fly off us, the rubber tread we leave behind. We’ll run so far and fast our demons will forget us in the face of their failure to catch us.

The days will pass in striations of colour so vibrant it makes every acid trip of your youth seem lifeless and dull. The sun will burn the earth amber and gold and the rain will wash the wheat fields anew, the grass so saturated a green you could lie on it for hours, rich as summer peaches, soft as eiderdown. You’ll drive recklessly, and me illegally. We won’t talk for hours; the countryside will do that for us. In this shell-shocked, virgin landscape, shifts are taken behind the wheel, where communication carries license plates across the centre console island on the waves of Southern blues, deafened by the earthquake-thunder-rumble of every passing freight train. I’ll be Charlie, you be Johnny, breaker breaker 10-4 good buddy, do you read me? Come on.

I’ll be Charlie. When I’m driving across the state border you’ll wake like a car backfiring, like an alarm in your biological clock, trembling with the uncertainty that we made a mistake, we need to go back, you’ll say, how many Ks? My job—

It sucked. You hated it.

Man, this is wild. My boyfriend—

Knows. You texted him yesterday. He’s no good for you, so what does it matter? I won’t say that last part. It’s been dripping from my tongue since you first mentioned him, my jealousy a palpable, growing thing, so why would I say it when there’s a chance you’ll make me turn around? Why would I say that when he’s not a person, won’t be a person, he’ll be one of the bags you leave behind on the conveyor belt, drowning with all the forgotten things at the airport we never went to in that city we didn’t meet in. That time we went to the Gold Coast and tried to sell oregano to toolies. He’s the nine-carat diamond you’re not missing, he’s the excuse you tell yourself why you haven’t moved on to fall asleep at night. The fear will subside after several minutes, so you’ll think about him more to keep it, fire it up with the encroaching dawn to buffer the feeling of what you’re really missing. Out here on the road, this empty landscape mirrors what’s within you.

I won’t say he’s no good for you, because what do I know, I’m no good for you either. We’ll hold onto our silence a little longer, letting ourselves transform it from the awkwardness of two people with nothing in common and too much history into the deeper connection of soulmates who don’t need words, because the truth of them doesn’t suit us.

Fuck It was a town we passed years ago, where I was the kind of person who knew how to love without taking and knew how to let you love without giving too much of yourself but that was years and lives and trades and schools ago, if it ever was, if that town existed. I want you to know you made me, and every day you remake me over and over, your name on the tongue I push into other, less-deserving mouths, your birthplace the map my blood travels to carry oxygen to my heart. I’m Charlie, and in the alien universe of potential and wheels and selfless love I get to brush the dusty cobwebs of your hair behind your ear, just to whisper an invasion of truth I should have spoken years ago, but in this story I’m still the selfish one. I’m the one with my foot on the gas pedal, pulling you into the car.