I can't believe her. I see her right in front of me, I hear her voice, I've felt her touch, but I cannot believe she exists.

She's as real as everyone else I see on this Savannah Central street. But she can't be. She went alone in the morning through an alley and waited at a deserted walkway for me to appear because a stranger told her to. With my phone. And knowing that, she still came for me. It's a picture too absurd and crazy to be anything else but a Vincent Van Goat, and yet she exists beyond the borders of a wooden frame. She's amused at my disbelief and can't shake how bad I look in these baggy clothes. She pops off a stifled snicker and explains it with "That hoodie's big enough for both of us!"

I'd laugh, too, but I am out of my vulpine element. Last night weighs as heavy on me as the fear that I'm gonna get made. But the image of her slipping into the thing with me still gets a smile to compliment "Where are we going?" She answers with an alert pause, grabbing me by my hand with tension and pulling me into a storefront. A tea shop, oddly out of place in this predator side of Savanah Central street, but I'm more curious about "Why are we in here?"

"plainclothes cop at the corner. Gray wolf." Thank god for the extra pair of eyes. Thank god for that paw still wrapped around my own. I'm not gonna doubt her. You can take a cop out of his uniform, but you can't shake that aura from them, nor the flow and tempo of their body language. It's an unmistakable tell, and the fact she noticed it leaves me aware that she's had her own run ins with the cops. I look behind, hoping I won't see a lupine face staring back at me from the other side of the glass.

"Excuse me, Miss?" I turn back to Eva's addressing of a badger waitress, with an earnest anxiety on her face as she tells the half-lie "Miss, I don't want to ask but, but there's a large male outside that's looking for us and we really need to leave. Could you..."

She didn't have to say another thing. Moments later, we were out through the backdoor and thanking that waitress as Eva led me down the alley. And by now, I couldn't take it anymore. No amount of what Lola could've told her about me could amount to her knowing much more about me than I know about her. She's aiding and abetting, and if I go down, I don't want to drag anyone down with me. I had to stop and tug her grip back to get her to look into my eyes. "Why're you doing this?" She inhaled in the shock of that, it took her by surprise, but she doesn't skip a beat. "Because I think I love you." And now, now this has gotten too absurd for me to not challenge it. My brows slip into a furrow as I present my case:

"You think you love a wanted deadbeat that you barely know from dancing with him at a party?"

She huffs, her grip around my paw tightening. "You know, I take it back. I don't think. I know I love you." She leans forward and grabs at the collar of my hoodie. Such forcefulness, from such a petite frame, is so unexpected that it's left me paralyzed. "I love you because of everything you've said and done up until now. And that dancing? That was the most passionate moment I've ever shared with anyone. What you expressed while you were dancing was more than everything all of my exes ever expressed in all of my past relationships." She tugs me closer to elaborate with a single word: "Combined." The would-have-been ballet dancer's words strike me. But now, in spite of those words, I have to plead.

"I've never hated someone so much that I wished prison on them and I've never been so needy and selfish enough to want someone dragged through hell with me."

She's leering, now. Coldly, with a matter-of-factly expression. "What do you know about mustelidae?"

There is a tension in her. An unease that is an undercurrent in every predator I've ever known. But hers, though like mine, is different in spite of that familiarity. It's a neediness and a desperation that's like a song with lyrics that are gibberish but a clearly defined emotion. It's behind her eyes, and it's in her stance. The way I've seen many mustelid carry their arms close to their bodies like a praying mantis.

"...You covet. You yearn." I was so close to the narrative I can see swelling out of her before she lends it her voice.

"We empty vessels harbor a yearning that will never be sated before the world starves us to death. We seek a fulfillment that we will always be denied. We're among the world's most precious commodities, and we're robbed of all other meaning. But we covet as greatly as we are coveted, and we covet with such fever that it gives meaningless life more meaning than any other."

Her monologue was like a practiced recital of a gospel. It's force has demolished all of my walls. "...I think that's some of the most beautiful poetry I've ever heard out of someone's mouth... " I am only left with one last defense: "I just... I just didn't think I was worth-"

Another embrace stops me. I look down below me to sincere eyes that harbor begging. "You are worth everything I could throw away." A radiance, like a fire, dances over my back. Black gloved vulpine paws that once suspended in the air around her from the shock reciprocate her own paws' grip around my torso. It's such a delicate moment, so fragile and tender, that I have no further heart to protest. I feel warmth. I feel love. I feel like a train has just hit me. And it has. A small, petite black-masked train with a voice that I'm suddenly aware is beyond her youth in determination and wisdom. Some awkward sound is choked out of me by it, I feel suddenly weak, I feel tears.

"Owen..."

I shed what's left of my pride and in a heartbeat, I am squatting down and have tucked my cloaked head into her and with nothing to hide or prove, I let my emotion pour over her. I am wanted. I am needed. I am coveted by the last person on earth that cares for me and understands me and wants to stand there like a pillar I've forgotten how much I wanted in the past. "I just, I just, oh god I just didn't know how much, how, how much I longed for, for someone like you." "Ma'am, is there a problem here?!"

I freeze. A cop.

"Sir, there isn't a problem."

"Are you sure this male isn't a threat?"

It's never that easy. When a female is alone in an alley with a male predator, it's never that easy. I can feel how nervous she is. She can feel how nervous I am.

"...This boy is crying and in a lot of emotional turmoil right now, Sir. And believe me, I can defend myself. I'll call law enforcement if I need help. But right now, he needs mine. Please, let me take care of him."

a long pause. I can feel her eyeing him down. I don't dare look up and out from her.

"...I'm gonna give you a verbal warning for a public disturbance. And get back on the sidewalk. Alleys are for commercial offloading." I can barely hear the sound of flesh padded paws walking away through the hoodie's cloak. It was the wolf from earlier. I must've been downwind of him, or else he could've made me by scent. Or maybe, maybe he was just a good person. One predator recognizing another predator's state of dismay. Badge and all.

I look up, and I find myself in the relieved eyes of this impossible girl. I look around, we're on the sidewalk. I look behind, at the frustrated feline taxi driver behind this bus I now find myself on. I look forward, she's looking back as she leads me down the subway station. She's a magician, making time a blur and all I'm left with is vignettes as she asks me about my life. She's blinded my observer eyes to all those countless others we two share this city with. I should be worried about cops, but it's like she's navigating me around every big bad badge that could come our way. It's like she's my radar, as long as I'm with her. Like it's noone else's world but hers and it'll do as she pleases, as I find myself in a sub with her as it shoots out from it's tunnel, with water in the horizon framed in the leftside window. "What line are we on?"

I know we're on the west side of Savannah Central and that's it."The zootopia line. You've never taken it to the rainforest district?" I have to pause and confess halfheartedly. "...I'm not a public transportation kind of guy." She scoffs, entertained. "Too many unfriendly faces staring you down?" I have to let out a single chuckle, but she's right. She's got me pretty figured for someone I still know so little about. In an enclosed space like this, prey never let their eyes off preds for more than a moment. When I'm on my motorcycle, everyone's rolled up windows are a barrier.

"Well, they're not going to look for you in Rainforest, right?"

I remember now, the subject brought up in the bus of places I hardly go. "Yeah... Yeah, it's probably my safest bet right now." In spite of all the traffic cams there, made necessary by the density of the vegetation.

"So we'll go there!" comes out of her ecstatic smile. I have to quirk a brow at it, and smile a little knowingly at a realization. "You've got something planned." her face is so beautifully adorable when it's scrunched up with a tender smile. A part of me still can't believe her, but so much more of me just wants something more to go on and a little of me just wants to go along with it, but the rest of me can't. "...Eva, I know we've spent this whole day together, but we still know so little about each other."

She smirks with a "You mean you know so little about me." and with that, I'm reminded again, that Lola's told her so much about me, and the ferret's been asking me to confirm it all this whole time. "I mean I know so little about you. You're crazy about me and I love the way you dance. That's it!"

She laughs again. "I wouldn't call it dancing. I'd call it dooking more than anything."

The cheek of her feigned modesty. I don't even immediately process what she said. "I don't care, it's so beautiful and frantic. Wait, you call it what?"

"Dooking! Ferrets and weasels tend to... What are you smiling about?"

I can't help it. The thought is firmly planted in my head and I must lend it my tongue. "Your petname is now dookie." An egregious, shamed giggle, a punch to my arm beside her.

"Ow!"

"Get the f out, no!"

"I'm serious! Tell me it doesn't make sense!" I can tell I won the battle, but the war?

"You're still gonna pay for that!"

"Oh yeah, When?"

She answers with an abrupt, sudden tickling of my side. "No! Uh, AACK! Stop it, we're causing a scene dag nabbit AH NO! nnnNO!" comes out of my in between the laughs

"You started it!", she retorts.

A loud, forced disgruntled sigh makes obvious a disapproving rhino in a business suit as he gets up to move to another car, having had it with these two predators getting playful in public. We both stop, knowing he speaks for the rest of the prey in our immediate vicinity. An awkward silence. an awareness that we have to keep a low profile in public that temporarily escaped us.

"...We're not too far from Vine street, anyway. We'll catch the Rainforest District line there, and then we get off at Vapor road."

"What's on Vapor?"

"Not on, but close enough... And you'll see!"

I can't help but remind her again, "I still know next to nothing about you, you know."

She finds herself prompted to reach for her phone for some reason, and offers it to me. "Want to trade, Owen?" her invitation catches me off guard and I've got to ask "Wait, what for?" she holds back an eyeroll as she elaborates:

"You got music on your phone, right?"

"Yeah." I can feel the sub train starting to come to a stop.

"So, what better way to find out more about each other than the music we listen to?"

If this was anyone else, they'd think she was crazy. And maybe she is, but she's in the company of a kindred spirit. When I've had little else, I've had someone else's words. I've had their voices, their guitar, their violins. So I nod with enthusiasm and a brightened gleam in my eye, forking my phone to her without hesitance as the train comes to a stop and we get up.

"Don't look through my picture folder." comes out as an afterthought and sends her into a laughing fit before a cheeky "Don't look through mine either!" is offered up with a coy glance from behind her denim jacketed shoulder. The doors slide open and much larger mammals loom over us. She clutches my hand and leads me. It's a scene I can't get over. A small female in complete charge, leading around a much larger male. But I feel no less of a male, but all the more a luckier one.

"The train on the rainforest line is already leaving?!" flies out of her, and in an instant, she breaks into a sprint and drags me with her, in between the legs of a giraffe and around so many equines and deer and groups of Caprinae and Cervines. A dizzying speed, a frantic pace. If we were any larger, we would be causing a scene, a cop that would surely be stationed here would see us.

"Eva! What the H, we can make the next train!" doesn't sway her as she fires back with a "We can make this one, too!" and the doors start to close so far in the distance. I groan, because I know what this means. I have longer legs than her. I can run faster. And on the hunch I can carry her, I pick up the pace and scoop her up in my arms as I run as fast as I can and with a jump, I fly into the doorway with millimeters to spare as the doors clamp down and I slide over a mysteriously wet floor, jumping up again and spinning to slam my back into the seat's backrest, the force knocking what breath I had out of me. A cough, a gasp for breath, a reminder, as the scene I caused directs eyes to us. Keep a low profile, the bull told me. Stay as low as a roach. But I haven't been. And I've been too swept up by this ecstatic, giddy ferret girl in my lap trying to contain a squeal to keep myself reminded of it.

"That was so clutch!"

"Oh god, I could've lost my brush!"

"Your what?"

I halfway feign a frown as I look down "My tail! Foxes call their tails brushes and I could've lost it!"

She fidgets around in my lap to shift and look around me. "Well you still got it!" With a roll of my eyes and smile as I hold back the Oh You I wanna sigh out.

"Eva, I ought to be in hiding in some bunker." My muted, quiet tone stresses that her answer be mutually quiet, and it is.

"I know, but you're safe with me." Everything in my body is telling me thats what I should be telling her, if there was such a thing as safety in public. But there's not. Not with me.

"But I'm not safe in public. And you're not-"

"Safe with you?" An irritation boils out of her. I want to explain, but I'm stopped as she shoots out a quietly frustrated "Owen, you think the cops are only looking for you?"

That question can only have one explanation: "...They're looking for you, too." She leans in closer to my ears and whispers her reveal.

"Conspiracy warrant. I had to stay with my sister, her boyfriend was dealing product and he dealt to a snitch. I managed to escape when the swat team raided, she didn't, and I found out through the grapevine they charged her with conspiracy and because I was living with them..." They decided she was part of the operation the sister's boyfriend was running, even though it was just him. Not her sister, and not her. But they always do this. They always treat the women like they take part in their significant other's slinging. They always charge them, they always convict, and the minimum sentence for conspiracy is twice as long as dealing itself. And no amount of judges complaining about the system has changed it. Because they're not in charge of the system. The vote-hungry prosecutors and sheriffs and other politicians are.

"Eva, if they catch us, it's two birds with one stone." A sharp leer forms in her black mask. "Do all foxes just care about survival at all costs or is it just you?"

A sharp phantom pain. "Does it matter if my first priority is survival?"

"No, Owen, because I'm tired of running. I'm not gonna live forever, and I'm not gonna run forever. And I'm not gonna wait out some stupid statute of limitations and let them take my youth."

"But they're gonna take it and more if they catch you."

"I'm not going to play their game, Owen! And I don't want you to, either!" A quick glance over her left shoulder, and she sees something, she hides it, but I can feel her tension.

"But-"

No more buts. She gets up and buries my face in her torso again as she grips it in a hug. I hear the sound of law enforcement footwear. It is unmistakable, her attempt at concealing my face somehow genuine enough that the officer's pace doesn't skip in it's tempo as the badge strolls past us. She's tucked her muzzle into my ear, and whispers out such a delicate, emotion heavy "I want to Live, Owen. Don't you?" A long pause. A deafening silence in spite of all the noise this sub has to offer. She lets go and looks into my eyes with a thirst for life in their gleam. "Was this the only way to get where we're going, Eva?"

"Lola's working, so I couldn't ask a ride from her, and I didn't have money for a taxi." It sounds like money is about as sparse with her as it is for me.

"How do you get by?"

"...I steal cosmetics from stores and pretend I'm one of those door-to-door beauty supply girls." Any prey would have a field day with that admission. It would confirm all of their prejudice, and it would all be wrong, because they're wrong from the start. They are wrong in thinking it's because she's a weasel, because she's a predator. Because that's not it and will never be it. When we have no other options, mammals have to do whatever it takes to survive, and predators have fewer options than prey. We have to get by any way we can. We are products of the circumstances that have been afforded and denied to us. Mammals like me and her, digging through trash and shoplifting, we're not like this because of what we are, but because of what prey say we are, and dictate what we are to become.

Eva wasn't allowed to be a ballet dancer. I wasn't allowed to be whatever I've forgotten I wanted to be. Toby Antelier knows better. No other prey I've ever dealt with does. "You're doing it again. Thinking too much." she reminds me.

"Yeah... I can't help thinking about how screwed up this world is." A simple nod from her. A folding of her paws together against her chest. I'm reminded of her weight in my lap and have to tell her that my legs are going numb. She understands and gets up to seat herself to my right. The rest of the train ride is silent. We're both left with the past-time of mammal watching, dissecting the lives everyone around us, from how they carry the clothes on their backs before we get to our stop. The upper class Babyrousa Celebensis boar and Tapirus Terrestris sow opposite of us with wedding rings and doubts about their futures. The bored Hydrochoerus Hydrochaeris in his suit making the characteristic horizontal swipes of a timber user and occasionally glancing at the Tapir next to him.

The Elephas Maximus bull exhausted from manual labor and a massive hardhat in his lap. The paranoid Neofelis Nebulosa in designer jeans and tanktop, with a female Cuon Alpinus trying to consul the leopard with her paw on the other's lap, trying to tell her it's all gonna be fine. Eva's eyeing the couple, and I think the words They're Not Gonna Stay Together are on the tip her tongue, but she's biting it. A gradual deceleration, a computer generated Now Arriving at Vapor Road Terminal. "That's us." I say. She nods and gets up in sync with me. We line up behind the crowd behind the massive Bos Gaurus bull, who will have to duck to clear his horns of the door's threshold. The sight of another large bovine scares me a little after my encounter with Lucifer.

Eva feels this, and locks the digits of her paws into my own to fight away my weakness with her own: She needs me, as much as I now need her in my humbled state. I think I get it now. Her selfishness is in her selflessness. "...You love me when I least deserve it."

"That is when you need it most." she tells me.

She says it like someone wasn't there when she needed them, and now she finds herself giving others, giving me, that very thing they denied her. This is what she needs from me, as she leads me out into the terminal and up the stairs. The chance she never had. "You're a cancer." I observe, and I've solicited "And you're a virgo." in kind. The steps are wet, either from overhead sprinklers or natural precipitation.

"We're gonna get soaked."

"Yeah... I thought this through." A mischievous gleam in her eyes as she looks back at me. A plotting smirk.

She charges forward with a skip and pulls me forward into the fray of the wet sidewalk's muted hustle and bustle. It's a light drizzle, but the clouds hang low and heavy. High humidity and a hoodie does not a happy fox make, as the rain keeps coming down on us inspite of the occasional shelter of the umbrellas of larger beings. Up wooden stairs, a fortunately covered jungle walkway leading up to unfortunately exposed platforms over the district's ground level.

"Eva, you better be taking me to a fur dryer!" I tell her, as we settle into a jogging pace.

"That wouldn't be any fun!" is quipped at my expense.

I would curse her if I could, but I'm starting to enjoy this silly getting-out-of-your-shell journey she's taking me on. The twists and turns don't stop, but they still slow us down. The rainfall comes and goes as it pleases, and every time we pass a traffic camera I start to worry, but that's when she grips tighter, and when I realize theres no hateful eyes staring me down as I stare at the lens. We're across another rope bridge, leading inside of shear cliff side with a road carved through and revealed by the holes in the face of it. If only I came here on my Vulpon. The acoustics would be killer if I could keep control on this uneven surface. "How much further?"

"Just a little!"

With no traffic to endanger us, she sprints across the road with me behind her to the opposite side and to a door she leaps towards the handle of to unlock with her weight as she lands back on her feet. "You dragged me all the way here for this?" She chimes with a nope as the door opens to reveal a tunnel, and the sunlight at the end of it. I gravitate toward it naturally. On my own, without her help. The walls of this tunnel were carved by paw and was as clumsily carved as the roadway behind me.

"...Where did you take me?"

"To my best hiding spot~."

One last flight of stairs and... A clearing. On the edge of a cliff overlooking the border between the rainforest and canal district. Behind it and in the tree line, a shipping container overgrown with brush. The front doors left open, it's inhabitation obvious. And all the signs of it lead to the ferret girl I turn around to in shock. Her feigned modesty betrays her pride. "...I'm still working on the plumbing." She jokes as I walk into the thing, past a cinder block and 2 by 4 table with aerosol paint overspray. A small makeshift bed. A cardboard box here or there of clothes. A couple of trash bags of dirty laundry. There's no plumbing, no electricity, but she's done it: she's found and made for herself a piece of remote island in the middle of the world's largest city.

And in the back, a work space of more cinder blocks and 2 by 4s with particle masks and neatly lined cosmetics in various states of being sanded down and spraypainted. That's how she manages to trick the women she sells stolen beauty secrets to. She repackages them. I have to appreciate, for a moment, how well finished her end results look. "...They look fresh out of a factory."

"And not out of a trashcan~."

The singsong burn was so unexpected and sharp in it's sting that I'm left frozen in stomach churning mental anguish for a moment or two as my eyes stare into nothingness. The ferret wasn't kidding when she said Lola told her everything about me. I'm suddenly reminded how miserably wet I am. "...Eva? I think you owe me Several towels." They come flying and draping themselves over my head and I hear her walking outside to excuse herself. Several minutes later, and I'm a little less damp and been reminded, as I put my stupidly oversized pants back on, that I have her phone and she mine. A swipe here and there, and I'm looking through her music. She's already looking through mine, seated on the edge of her abode's entrance.

I take my place beside her and discover, as I read the names of these bands, how much we have in common. Bon Ivory, Cold War Kits, Felis + The Machine, The Hocks, Mouflon Stevens, Interwolf, "... Lupine Fiasco, M. Herd, My Summer Coat, Moossirrey-" "Taurus y Moi, The Territorial, They Might be Giraffes, Ottervil River, Simple Kit-" The rollcall she's joined me in is growing louder, more excited, so very frantic in ecstasy, we're losing ourselves to an incredible fact that stands against all odds: YOU'RE INTO THE SAME MUSIC I AM comes out of us nearly in sync. "Oh my God, Eva, You're into The Vigor!"

Her eyes widen ever more. "You too?! AAAAAAH!" She can't contain herself and neither can I.

"I can't believe it, and not just Bittersweet Melody! You got all their albums, even Richard Howlcroft's solo stuff!"

"...You only got Urban Calls and Onward?"

I am not about to let that dismissal slide and have my love of this band questioned. "Hey, just because I don't have as much of their stuff as you do doesn't make me any less of a fan."

"Yes it does!"

"Oh wait just right there, Bittersweet Melody kept me sane and alive when I was a teen. That's all the evidence I need to plead my case."

She objects with an eyeroll and pfft as she keeps looking through my phone before stopping and asking me

"...Whats Swan?"

After seeing all the Dashing Buntings albums on her phone, I'm earnestly surprised but still play it up and turn to her slowly and dramatically, getting her chortling as I reply to her question with my own: "You never heard of Billy Goatan's coverband of his former band?!" The stars in her wild eyed shock say everything before she squeaks out a long, muted "Whhhaaaaat?" and before I can even start to sass her about what a terrible dashing buntings fan she is, her body is flying through the air and clumsily darting all over her front yard and beaming with passionate joy. How ditsy, how infectious and horrible her wanton display of silly playful joy. If she's blushing, she's not blushing enough, which leaves me picking up slack for her. she recovers her composure in waves. I just about can't do it at all.

"...I'm just gonna listen to a song or two." falls under her breath.

"Make sure one of those songs is Sincerely! Best song on their whole album!"

My recommendation hopefully registered in her ears before she tucked buds into her ears and ran into the brush. I'm alone. I could easily navigate through her texts and pictures, but I'm not compelled to do it all. If it were anyone else, I would. But for once, either because it's her or because I've gone through so much in the past twenty four or so hours, I'm too humble to dare. So I go through her library again, under different sorting options, and find the band ranked highest in plays. Take Me to The Scurry is a song I'm already familiar with, but that takes 2nd place to a song of theirs I never heard of. The title of it says so much, and feels like an immediate insight on her, but I can't immediate grasp it.

But it's about now, just now, that it's starting to sink in, how brilliant her logic was when we traded phones. I understood it from the beginning, but that's the problem with knowledge: The bulb is not always connected to an on & off switch but sometimes a dimmer. There are layers of understanding. Degrees of it's internalization. And right now, I think I get her. I think get her like the blades of grass under my paws and the shadow of this plateau over all that rests below it, as the sun sets in this momentary break in the cloud cover. The brush behind the treeline shifts and I watch as a lightheaded, flutter hearted ferret girl stumbles in her bliss. I recognize it immediately as the same way I get after a song has gotten me high. I just never thought I'd see it in anyone else.

If we were in a park, she would be in handcuffs. She would be getting searched for product. The officers would be getting too damned eager and pleased about it. They would beat her the first reason she gave them, and resisting arrest is always a good excuse to God DAMN this city for being so beautiful, so ugly, so flawed an emerald, and god damn my head for constantly pulling me back into reality and out of this beautiful little moment.

"You're doing it again."

I sigh in frustration with myself.

"I know, Eva, I'm sorry, I just... Why does this world have to be so messed up and why do I have to keep reminding myself of that?"

She doesn't answer, but she tries not to let my observer's mind let her down.

"You were right, that Sincerely song was amazing." has a certain weight in her voice as she admits it that pushes away the ugliness in my mind.

"I know. I saw how much it affected you... You felt it." The words take her back. She knows what I'm talking about it.

"You didn't just hear it. You listen to songs all the time, but you don't feel them. But you felt that song. You felt every verse, you felt the treble of the guitar, the keys of the piano, you felt it all like different ghosts with their personalities, their own dance, and they danced inside of you, in different parts and at different depths. They touched you and reached through you like spirits because they were alive. That's what songs are, they're life in it's purest form. We manifest it out of thin air and in turn, life dances inside of us."

She's sort of breath, she's trembling, like I've acknowledged something deep inside her that's been rotting for not being known or shared. And now it blooms. And now she runs to me, leaping into me, knocking me down, my back pressed into the shipping container's wooden floor. "You know music like I do! YOU KNOW IT LIKE I DO!" Her wild eyed relief, her ecstasy. I don't think I've ever seen someone this happy, so genuinely happy. I'm not alone is the only thing I can say. "...I knew you had something in you." she tells me, and I have to ask her: "Since When?"

"Since the party. It was how that song turned you into a bottle rocket."

It did, "But I jumped out of a window.", and that's the part that's getting me.

There's so many other things, but the fact I did that has cemented the idea I'm not good for her.

"Did you mean to?" gets a quick "I didn't even know I did until I opened my eyes." and she acknowledges it with a "But you did.".

So where is the argument? "Yeah, I flew out of a window." I have to remind her, as if it's not already as established as 2+2=4.

She looks at me dead in the eyes as she brings it all back with "Like an out of control bottle rocket. And that's when I knew I really wanted you."

I can't even think straight when confronted with the absurdity, and the feeling on my face is mutual. She wants me, I want her, but I know where I'm heading. She wants to protect me, to nurture me, but it's going to be her undoing.

"Eva... I know you want me. We've known each other for such a sort amount of time, but I get you know enough about me to think you want to stick around me... But this isn't gonna end well. You know that, right?"

I've forced her to become serious again, to make her next words to ring true like an arrow in the bull's eye.

"I don't care how long we stay together, Owen. I just want to have you for as long as I can."

I can't.

I can't understand.

"Why? Why do you want to throw it all away for me..." I have to pause, and hold her by the side. I'm desperate to understand. "...How can you think like that?"

She doesn't hesitate to answer my question with her own question: "Do you believe in the gospels songs can instill in someone?"

"Yes."

I believe in it with every fiber of my being.

"...Then you need to hear a song."

I'm lost for words and actions. She takes action in mine's absence, grabbing her phone out of my hand and navigating it's music library.

"You saw what my most played song was?"

I don't have to think back far, and reply just as quickly: "Yeah... Something by a band called Suns."

She pulls her earbuds out of my phone and grabs something else from her denim jacket. An auxiliary splitter.

"Your buds?" comes with a soliciting open paw which receives the end that is promptly plugged into the splitter along with hers before the splitter is jacked in to her phone. She nods as she puts her buds in her ears, and I do the same. And I don't know what's going to happen next, but it feels like light pouring out the threshold of a pitch black room. The moment she presses play, a steady beat of a drum and a ghostly, understated melody of one synth, the quiet, sudden strokes of the keys of another. And then the lyrics come: There's been a lot of talk of love, But that don't amount to Nothing. You can evoke the stars above, but that doesn't make it something. And the only way to last, and the only way to live it, is to hold on when get love, and let go when you give it. Give it.

The guitar, the reverb of it, life, adventure, daring journey and epic adventure as the guitar cuts through me. Oh god. Oh, god, the entire damned thing. The words haunt me. The drumming thunder echoes like bombs in their shockwaves inside of me. At Least I Hold On When I Get Love. And I Let Go When I Give It, Give it, GIVE IT! The drums billow from above over us and penetrate my body in waves of explosions from my shoulders to my spine as the key strokes patters against the whole of my back like a downpour and the strumming of strings cut through me like brushstrokes with a scalpel. She serenades me from above me. A release of emotion like a corona. She's lighting up over me like a star, like a bomb, like a nebula.

An arching stretching of her back as she rolls her head back as though to ask the world "What Do I Do When I'm Lonelehh-ey-ehhh~?!". The perfectly pitch & tempo of her beseeching demands my reply, but I don't have it in me. It's like, it's like that 1997 movie Meeting has come to life, and I'm Doedie Foster, and I'm living that moment when she saw some celestial event. And I am. I am tearing up. I am choking. The World Won't Listen to This Song, and The Radio Won't Play It. But if You Like It, Sing Along. I'm so overwhelmed hysterical and thinking to myself that fate should have sent her a poet that could find the words to do right by this moment of beauty. Sing Cause You Don't Know How to Say It. And Always Hold on When You Get LOVE, So You Can Let Go When You Give It, GIVE IT, Give IT!

"What Do I Do When I'm Lonelehh-ey-ehhh~?!"

The perfectly pitch & tempo of her beseeching demands my reply once more, and now it comes to me by the time the hook repeats itself and do I know what I must say in absence of my own words:

"Hold On When You Get Love..."

"What Do I Do When I'm Lonelehh-ey-ehhh~?! What Do I Do~?!"

"Let Go When You Give It..."

"What Do I Do When I'm Lonelehh-ey-ehhh~?! What Do I Do~?!"

"Hold On When You Get Love... "

"What Do I Do~?!"

I feel the song in waves, in explosions, in the flourishing, bursting growth of a vine. The guitar's reverb. The ethereal likeness of a river, of one synth circling around me, The thunder, the billow of the drums, the chorus of mournful angels. Forget The Sun: Things Will Go On. I Can See You From The Dark With You Above Me. There is something so ominous in the line, but it's so beautiful, it's so beautiful, it's so beautiful, beautiful, beautiful and now, Now, Now I get it, I get it So clearly. Bruce McGrowlen once said that To Do Something Well is So Worthwhile That to Die Trying to Do It Better Cannot Be Foolhardy. And that's what she's doing: She's taking the weakest thing in her, her wants and needs, and making it her revenge on the world.

"I know, it's true, At least I Think I Do~!"

She's manifesting her own destiny in spite of all the world does to stop her, and at this exact moment, I can tell she doesn't care if she flies too high like Icarus. She's trying to live because god damn the world. The's reaching for a life measured in Results, not Numbers. The world tries with all it's might to take years and achievement both from predators, and through those wants and needs, she is fighting back with every tooth and every claw. She is beating the bastards with her desire for life, and at this very moment, with her over me, singing along to a frightening moment of clarity in lyrical form with a boy she wants more than any peace, any quiet, she is pummeling them into the ground and crushing them all.

"Take the weakest thing in you, And Then Beat The Bastards With It. And Always Hold On When You Get Love, So You Can Let Go When You Give It, Give It, Give It, Give It, Give It, Give It, Give It."

And the song repeats, and repeats again, and over and over. Until her battery dies. Until the dead of night, with the welcomed full moon over a clear night sky. And I get it now. As crazy, as absurd, as so against everything the world taught me as it is, I understand now completely:

Hold on when you get love so you can let go when you give it.