Stung

The sun is bright, desert bright, the skies are clear when we wake. We spend the day negotiating the border between shade and sun, but my pale skin burns regardless. I spend the evening in candy cane stripes, emanating heat into the sitting room.

Night after another it's the same story. Voices of friends decades in the making say We must get out of here, There must be more to it than this, Our lives are passing so quickly and there's a whole world out there to make. I see our youth in their eyes, see the dreams we made for ourselves when all was possible.

Across the ocean lies a world of predictability, of stability and ease. If we are to make anything extraordinary of these lives we have, we must run, we must fly, we must fight.

I look at the eyes across the room. Ten years, twenty years of friendship in the making. I would not be this person without them. We owe the children we once were together, to fly, to fight like hell.