• The memory of music floats around us as we dance in a room filled with smoke and shattered dreams. Broken promises scatter the floor we stand on like the leaves that cover the gutters outside this bar. A million things we never told each other, a thousand lies, and a hundred truths. Around us live the hopes of lives that are now over, things that the lost and lonely call upon us to finish. It's our job to live for them. The walls are covered with words. Written by people not much unlike ourselves; children who just want to find their own lives in a world run by adults. "I just want to be free" is what you had scrawled in the shadows of the corner just last night. It broke me down when I read it; you're too wild to know what the confides of captivity are. Your breath dances across my nose as you press against my body. You're much too young to be drinking, but I can smell the alcohol that you'd stolen from my father's pantry. "We can be free together," I had written underneath, scratched into the paint with the tip of a knife I kept deep in my pocket. That's what I whispered to you, those five words that made your eyes just light up in the darkness of our misery. "Free..." you muttered, your lips at my hair, "I've always wanted to be free..." Your voice is filled with pain and regret. If only my words were true. Make that a thousand and one lies; a thousand and one things that I wish could be true.