“I search all the time on the ground for our shadows cast side by side,
just to remind me that I haven’t gone crazy,
that you exist and are mine.
And I know that your skin is as warm and as real as that smile in your eyes,
but I have to keep touching and smelling and tasting,
for fear it’s all lies.”

We walked side-by-side down the back alley, the sound of predictability rumbling in the distance as everyone rushed to the hour of the end of a day. You took my hand in yours as if it was something we did all the time, as if we were years into this, as if I was yours, and you were mine. For a spell of time we said nothing, just wandered slowly, your thumb tracing circles on my palm in an unconscious rhythm and I thought to myself that it was too late now to turn back and run.

You followed me to my car, the last in the lot, parked in the corner beneath a flickering street lamp. I leaned back against the hood, and you took space in front of me, face-to-face, your hands finding mine again. The silence was broken by my shaky voiced attempt to say “I can’t“. You caught the words like you caught my breath, leaning in to kiss me. When we broke apart you looked at me in all that wide-eyed determination and said “we already are.” I sighed in resignation, or maybe it was relief, because I knew it was too late now to turn back and run.

So, tell me that there are answers in the wind that carries the smell of salt water up into the hills. Sing me the ways and the means that any of this is really happening. Promise me that this is not just some trick of light, or a one-hit and miss that I will one day wake to find gone. Explain to me how you can see the wings of possibility when the horizon seems full of my fear of returning to feeling nothing at all. Show me how it is really too late now to turn back and run.

Angel Mine :: Cowboy Junkies