Promise Me

I am sitting in my boyfriend’s car, a metallic silver Volvo 760; the kind all the “agents” drove at the time. And when I am saying "agents", don't think spies, but more sales representatives smuggling the latest advanced technology in spreading manure. We’re cutting through the back roads. It’s winter, cold, dark, and raining. One of those November Sunday nights when you wish you could get drunk and wake up only at the end of March.

I know he will drop me off at my parents’ [we are not married yet], and there the anguish is palpable, the desperation masquerading as lunch and dinner because we all skip breakfast. I feel a well-known weight in my stomach, and it's getting heavier and heavier the closer we get.

Beverly Craven is singing *Promise Me* on the player, one of those early Philips compilation CDs. She is saying she is going, in some way; she is leaving, and asking him to wait for her. Among the fields of lost crops, the soil half-asleep, I am on the tarmac of some faraway airport, texting the man who loves me and who gets me: "wait for me, I am coming home; I am coming back to you". I adjust my seatbelt, and the waitress smiles at me. The flight is going to be long, but it doesn't matter: it lands in March.

Two more bends and we will see the lights of Udine appearing. The traffic, the noise, and the smell of a distant brewery are always present. He will probably want some quick sex, hiding somewhere behind a line of trimmed trees, and I will say yes, because it delays going home.

I am in another world, smoking, with my forehead pressed against the window, and I am lying. I say I am happy, I say I care, like I mean it. I don't.

Why is it always someone else leaving and I am staying behind?