The stranger

I don't know why but summer nights here make the streets seem claustrophobic, all I hear is people talking about me when I pass them ("wasn't that...?"). It creeps up inside me sometimes, that restlessness and the chronic will to escape.

"Let's do it", Chloe says to me under the lights on the balcony, "let's go somewhere and never let them find us". She was always the vain romantic. I remember late August nights in the sand by the ocean when we were kids and the things she would see in the clouds above our heads. To me they were just clouds.

We would lay next to each other in the dark and breathe together, the warm winds would dance under our summer dresses and the waves in the water would sound like voices, telling me to escape. I remember closing my eyes and trying to feel my own heart beating and how I couldn't. I learned to understand early on that it was always just the calm before a storm.