Let's Leave it Here

"Let's end it here,
let's end it here.
Let's leave it here,
Let's leave it here."—Ladytron International Dateline

When we were in High School there was a field we would lie in at sundown. We'd split a pack of cigarettes and talk about how miserable we were. Sitting in a diner with Paul, Tess and Jake I wished for those days. Paul was fiddling with his spoon and talking to Tess who looked bored. We fiddled with our cups and spoons, delaying the inevitable. What had seemed like a good idea only a month ago was now sitting between us like a monster. We didn't speak about it, afraid to give it a name, afraid for what it meant about us. Looking at Tess I tried to remember why it was we were sitting at the same diner we used to sneak to in the middle of the night as teens. I wondered if there was a way to put the past back in the past.
---
The first time I'd met Tess I fell in love with her bored, arrogant eyes. Immediately I thought about how her full, pouty lips would look perfect with tendrils of blue smoke pouring from her and into me. Six months later, when we were huddled in the graveyard together with a bottle of Jack I found I was half-right. The closer she pulled Paul the tighter I clutched the bourbon. Lost in my own jealousy I couldn't hear her call for the liquor.
"Bailey? God damn it, Bailey," she barked.
"Huh?"
"Give me the whiskey."
"No whiskey here boss," I grinned into the dark.
"Just pass the Jack, man.' Paul interjected.
One long kiss and he was already talking for her. Reluctantly I gave up.
Ten years and many bottles of bourbon stood between then and now. We'd wound up living together and still whiled the evenings away smoking. Of the four of us Jake was the only one smart enough to let the past be past. Instead of complaining about the present like we used to, we waxed nostalgic. Every night was a walk down misery lane.
It was spring before our tenth anniversary when our "Remember the times," turned into "Let's go back for our reunion." Jake wisely fought against it. He chanted a litany of remembered miseries.
Finally he cursed, "No. Fucking. Way." His anger was palpable and had we not forsaken cigarettes for alcohol and pot I might've had the sense to agree. Instead I took a pull from my beer and tried to calculate the trip.
"You know, if we did it on our way to Montreal it wouldn't be too bad. We could check in see how it's been," I pointed out flatly.
"See what I mean," Tess took my words as encouragement.
"Didn't you guys hate it there?" Paul reminded us.
"I'm not talking about moving in. just a rest stop to inebriated paradise." Tess countered.
I sat quietly, trying vainly to remember the anger that place had always stirred in me. Ten bottles of beer, ten years and a few hours from that night in the cemetery I could barely remember why Tess' lips blowing smoke still made my chest tight. I looked up from packing a glass pipe I'd been given for graduation and saw Paul holding Tess how she'd never let me. Her long brown hair bled into his blond mop-top. All of a sudden I needed to be there at the school, at our field, in our row at the cemetery.
"Let's just go, we have to go past Philly anyhow, right?" I coaxed.
"Didn't we, kind of, swear to not go back to that place?" Jake tried.
"It's my car, so it doesn't matter. I say we go that way, we go that way."
Tess smiled appreciatively at me across Paul's chest. Something in my gut tugged tight. Ten years of the four of us and I couldn't remember how broken my heart had been that night in the cemetery. It was only in trying to look back that I realized how comical our relationship was. At seventeen we'd coalesced into our present quartet: Paul the musician, Tess the jaded seductress, Jake the wild spirit that kept us together and me, the obsessive writer.

Winter was fast approaching when we found our row in the cemetery, under a tree, near the chapel. Here the gravestones read the oldest dates and some of the names were nearly brushed off by the weather. At the time we'd only thought about how it provided us the most cover from prying eyes. Thinking about it now there was some sort of omen on those stones. They stood as monuments to a past that no one but their makers would ever remember. Many an evening we would sit, passing a bottle of wine around and talk about what our lives would be after college. I doubt we ever thought that we would be living in an over-priced studio apartment barely making rent and too stubborn to get real jobs.
I don't remember what it was that drew us together. Maybe it was Jake, or maybe it was the bored, arrogant sensibility that Tess incited in all of us. Somehow, though, when we were kids and were together we felt older, maturer. We still had that feeling, but now it was a reason to be nostalgic, not happy. Now we were worn out, as tired and used as our good memories of high school. In school we'd wanted to live in the future, live for cloudy, melancholy days and nights full of clubs and bars that were lit brighter than the sky we lived under. It was all we could talk about.
When the spring of our senior year came we lived out in the fields and in our row at the cemetery dreaming about a future filled with alcoholism and art. Our last months of high school we weren't there. Paul was trying to find the right song for Tess, Jake was sleeping around, Tess was simply absent as she'd always been and I was chronicling every bit of it.