I opened my eyes. His face was lying centimetres away from mine. Eyes were shut and a peaceful look was washed over his face. He was still asleep. I glanced at the clock stting on the bedside table next to him. It was 4 p.m. The curtains were closed and barely any light shone through. I pulled the bed sheet higher up my body. I turned to face him once again, and shivers ran down my spine. This 19-year-old lying next to me meant the whole universe to me. To even be in the same room with him, I couldn't help but smile. My hand reached out to touch him and when I did, he twitched. I giggled quietly as my fingers feathered his face. My hand traced his eyebrows, then his nose and then his lips. He loves it when I do that, but he's asleep,so he wouldn't notice it. I traced the arch of his eyebrows and traced his asymmetrical nose and traced the bow of his lips for the hundrenth time, but it felt like the first. I took in every fine hair as if I've never taken it in before. His face was one I would never get bored of.

     A dog barked outside and brought me back. I glanced at the clock that now read 5:05. I sat up knowing that I couldn't get back to sleep. I got off the bed and stood up to go to the bathroom. The cold of his marble floors took me by surprise. I opened the bathroom door and looked up at my reflection in the mirror. I was shocked to see the hickeys on my body as a result from the night before. A few on my neck and a few on my torso. But I shouldn't have been surprised. Every night I spend at his house, I would look like this the next morning. But our nights were innocent. Stripping down to our underwear was the farthest we've ever gone. And that was enough. But that day my hickeys have never seemed worse. The night before, he had told me that he loved me for the first time, and he said it was his first time to ever love someone this much, and he didn't hold back on expressing it. I touched the hickeys on my neck. Thankfully they didn't hurt that bad. I washed my face over the sink. My eyes were closed when he grabbed my waist from behind.

"Hey." I could hear that he was smiling. My lips curled up as I opened my eyes and faced him.

"Hey." I said back.

He pulled me out of the bathroom and onto the bed. We fell onto the bed and lay next to each other, doing absolutely nothing. I turned to him and sighed. We lay there looking at each other and not saying a word for the longest time. The sound of the ceiling fan echoed throughout the room. Outside, the dog barked again and children that were on the playground were laughing and screaming. We never needed to talk, just being there next to each other filled a void empty talk would never be able to. "When are you going home?" He finally asked. The mood turned serious. "I should be back by tonight." I said, dread filling up every inch of my body. Home was a place that did not make me feel at home. My parents were constantly arguing and fighting and my 5 siblings treat me like I don't exist. To make matters worse, the tension from fighting all the time made my parents treat their children like crap. They would disown me if they ever found out that I was gay. I quickly became depressed after my parents started behaving that way, and the person lying next to me was my only escape from that. Living in that house with those people forever was unbearable. It was empty bliss.

Tears welled my eyes as I thought of this. He noticed and he didn't have to ask what was going on, he knew each tear before it came. Our problems were similar, his parents would go insane if they ever found out about us. The paranoia was what had steered him towards anxiety. He pulled me close and none of us said a word. A tear or two escaped my eyes but that was it.

"I wish we could stay like this forever." I finally said.

After a moment of complete silence, he replied, "I think I might know how."

_____________

"Where are we going?" I asked for the millionth time, sitting in the passenger seat of his truck. "Just tell me!" He just shook his head.

After a while, the truck came to a halt. "We're here," he says. He had parked in the middle of a field. "Well, we're not there yet but we're close," he says. "Let's walk." I nodded as I unbuckled my seatbelt and got out of the truck. I shut the door of his 1979 Ford that used to be his grandfather's. He stopped and waited for me to catch up. I jogged over next to him.

The day was perfect. It was nearly sunset and the sky shone orange. The wind blew hard on the tall grass and made ripples on the field. The cool evening breeze felt pleasant against my skin.

"What's the best thing in your life?" he asked.

"You are the only good thing in my life." I replied.

We continued walking through the field, passing a park with benches and swings. An old couple sat on one of the benches, leaning on each other sound asleep.

"When I die, will you still love me?" he asked.

"You are immortal to me." I replied.

The wind had started to blow harder causing the trees to rustle. Leaves flittered around us before falling to the ground. His eyes followed them and landed on the soil beneath us.

"When I die, I want to be cremated." he said.

"Then I'll take that piece of you and I'll hold on for all eternity." I replied.

He grabbed my hand and squeezed tight. I noticed the tears welling up in his eyes. Birds chirping were the only sound that kept us company as we continued walking on to a place I didn't know of yet. We came across a freight train station and we were walking towards it.

"Are we going somewhere?" I asked. 

"Yes." he answered.

"Why are we going on a freight train?" I instantly pictured a scene: us riding on a freight train, occasionally jumping off but then jumping back on and continuing the journey to our nowhere that we sometimes talked about. He said nothing.

Still grasping my hand, he led me past the station and to the train tracks. Birds stopped chirping, the wind stopped blowing, we were once again in complete silence. "Perfect." He said with a smile. He sat down on the train tracks and patted the spot next to him, urging me to sit down too, so I did. I looked at the station and realized that we probably weren't going anywhere. The place appeared to be completely deserted, as if it hadn't been used in years. He smiled at me. "Isn't this nice? Look." He pointed to his left and I turned to look. The sun was setting now, slowly dissappearing into the field of tall grass, still slightly swaying. The sky was pink and purple and big clouds cast abstract shapes in the sky. The sun reflected against the sky, giving everything around us a pink hue. "Yeah." I said with a smile. I closed my eyes as he took my hand and our fingers interlaced. This is all I ever wanted. To be alone with him like this, nothing could be better.

The sun had set after a few minutes and I hugged him. "Thank you for bringing me here." And I had really meant it. I brushed off the dirt on my clothes and got ready to stand up. "Wait." he pulled my hand. "That's not it." He laid down and I laid down with him. The stars eventually came out and after a while, billions of silver stars filled the black night sky with swirls of the galaxies here and there. The stars twinkled every now and then and he named one of them after me. I breathed deep. At that moment I felt whole. "I never want to leave."

"You won't." he said.

Then, as if by fate, the tracks began to rumble beneath us and I heard a distant sound.

He pulled me close to his chest. "What are you doing?" I asked him in a panic, "We need to go." I knew what was coming, and I wasn't sure I wanted it to. He looked at me, and when I saw the look on his face I knew that right here and now was our only chance of truly lasting. He hugged me tighter.

"You're waiting for a train," he says to me. 

I could feel his heartbeat speed up. I clenched and unclenched my fists as I felt my blood drain from them.

"A train that'll take you far away,"

The sound got louder and I turned my head to look over my shoulder, from where it was coming from, and I saw it. He turned my head back towards him.

"You know where you hope this train will take you,"

His voice had gotten louder, fighting against the loud sound that only will get louder. I thought about everything I was about to leave behind: my family, my friends and the little treasures of this world. For that one second I wondered why all of that had even mattered to me.

"But you can't know for sure,"

By then the tracks were shaking uncontrollably and the conductor tried to warn us through his whistle. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

"Yet it doesn't matter,"

His voice was very loud now, almost yelling. The sound of the train was almost deafening. You could hear the brakes of the train screeching. But there was no way it would stop in time. He looked behind me, and panic filled his face. I could tell it was close. He held me even tighter, he was probably terrified too. I shut my eyes and let a tear escape from them as I felt it coming from behind.

"Because we'll be together."