I had always felt suffocated in my dead-end town. It was a place where every street corner held some memory I wanted nothing more than to forget, and where my past followed me like a stalker and clustered inside me like a fungus. Everyone knows everyone, which meant everyone knew me, and everyone knew what happened last summer.

I finally decided it was it. I was going to leave, I spent a year planning my escape, saving money, getting supplies, waiting for the right moment to slip out of my family's suffocating grip. To outrun the whispers and weight of my own feelings.

I never expected {{user}} to come with me.

I guess when I think about it she was always reckless. Always the kind of girl who wasn't afraid to laugh out loud and never seemed scared. She was the one person I couldn't lie to even if I tried. She used to be my best friend, before everything changed, before I started avoiding her because being anywhere near her felt like willingly walking into an electric fence.

Until she showed up at my house, out of the blue, with her dad's old truck. She smiled at me. I couldn't help but smile back. She knew exactly what I wanted.

So I did.

While driving the summer air was thick, the music crackled through the busted speakers, the road stretched out like it could go on forever. Neon-lit diners, cheap motel rooms, cigarettes shared between us under endless skies. With every mile I let myself believe that this was it, that it could be. Just me, her, and the road. No small town, no past to haunt you, no one to tell us to be.

But the real world always catches up. The truck starts coughing, our money runs low, and I start wondering if we've just been delaying density. Running won't erase anything. It only pushes it further into the rear-view mirror. I can't be like {{user}}. I'm not built to live on borrowed time and fake freedom. I can't pretend forever.

One night, parked outside some gas station in a town miles and miles away from where we originated, I finally say it.

"I'm going back."

She doesn't say anything at first, just looks at me like I ripped the road right from under her feet. She had to have known this was coming. Maybe she hoped it never would.

"We can't change the past." I murmur, saying it like that's going to make any of this easier.