2023, the farewell tour 

emma burden | Spring 2023

She looks at me like there is still hope in the world and that she’s holding onto it all. And laughs and laughs as she ties her Converse. She’s the Union Jack and old CDs and warm quilts paired with the cold side of the pillow. She’s diligence swamped by a mass of red hair. She’s inside jokes and paper money and the smell of pine and woods. Tea, not coffee. Gratitude and empathy and hilarious notions.

She’s strength personified, like the Greek god of war in the body of a teenage girl. And she smells like caramel lattes and the 11th grade English classroom. She drives as fast as she thinks, listens to music as loud as her mind. And, maybe it is all for the better, but that doesn’t absolve her care. She pretends that nothing matters, but everything does. Aspartame and Radiohead and football games. Love and anxiety and music. 

I’m defined by two opposing creatures, individuals built up as humans just as I am, but existing on another plane. When I close my eyes, we’re drinking hard lemonade at The 1975, or we’re driving home from stale waffles and hard bacon at First Watch, and we’re eating popsicles outside of the loa on Bonny Oaks Drive. We’re speeding down the interstate blaring Taylor Swift because we’re late to see the Preds, and God help us if we miss one of Josi’s goals. We’re cutting cinnamon rolls behind the counter of that damned Panera Bread and Kenny’s got both earbuds in. And you’ve lost the cat again, or the car isn’t starting, and one of us is missing their shift. I’m on the first flight home on the first day that I am able to escape New York. 

We can lay out at the artificial beach, down the pike, buried under the cover of oak trees, with dirty sand that dries beneath our toes. 

We can play mermaids in the pool.

The 1975. The Cure. Mitski. Phoebe Bridgers. Taylor Swift. The Smashing Pumpkins. boygenius. Radiohead. bôa.
The soundtrack to the past three years.

One day we can return to London, and we can laugh at the French. And you’ll join the Navy, and you’ll move to Ohio, and somewhere along the line already, school days turned into summer break, turned me away at school, turned into two weeks in the fall for me to see you. 

I don’t want to know when the last time the three of us will be together will be, but I know that day is coming soon. It’s sometime before the end of August, it’s between The Cure in Atlanta and before the drive to Great Lakes, Illinois.

If I knew I would be happy somewhere, and I could travel to that place, it would be in a car with the three of us.