Just For Tonight, Let’s Pretend We’re In Love

Just for tonight, let’s pretend that we don’t both know what is coming on the heels of the dawn.

Let’s ignore the ineffable truth that I love the unknown more than I could possibly love any constant. Let’s imagine that you don’t know that I will always be searching for something better, something more intriguing, something more like the fiction I have always treasured.

Let’s forget that you fall in love with strangers across a coffee shop based only on the way they tuck their hair behind their ears while I fall in love with sleepy-eyed boys in their cars next to me a stoplight, drumming enthusiastically along to music on their steering wheel. Let’s pretend that you don’t see my romantic restlessness as childishness and I don’t see your calculated insensitivity as just another proof of your unfailing indifference to the wonder of the universe.

For just one night, let’s forget it all.

Instead, we can fool ourselves into believing that we will try try to fall in love with the unknowns in one another instead. We can attempt to figure out the road maps to each other’s hearts, instead of planning the eventual “maybe we should call it a day” talk. We can pretend that we don’t already know how this ends. We can decide that here and now is our destination. We can forget the heartbreaks and the twists of fate and the betrayals that brought us to this point. We can choose to believe this isn’t just another one of those mistakes.

Even though we both know that isn’t true. Even though we know that by dawn we will have realized what a bad idea this is. You will go back to your constants and I will go back to my unknowns. By tomorrow, we will look on each other with cold eyes and even colder hearts. By tomorrow, this will be nothing but a rosy memory, a fading mistake. But tonight, let’s smile and laugh and share quiet moments of inescapable incertitude. If only for tonight, let’s pretend.