I want to run away with you. I don’t mean just for the night like a child running from her parents, I mean for as long as the world can carry us, until reality is clawing at our minds and eventually drags us back. I mean I want to get lost with you, in you. I want to find myself with you.

I want to leave our cell phones by the bedside and I want to take nothing but a rucksack and a Polaroid camera. I don’t want anything to come between us; I don’t want the life we leave behind to follow us there.

I want to fall asleep on your shoulder as you press your nose into my ruffled hair and watch the clouds dance beside us outside the airplane window. I want to feel weightless with you in the sky, the worry of college applications and flat hunting and the unknown falling away from us. I want it to be just you and me. I want to be free.

I want to get lost with you, in you.

I want to hold your hand and watch my excitement be mirrored in your eyes as we run down the steps and into a new country. I want to scrawl our names on to lockets in Paris and throw the key into the depths of the water, and I want to rub noses in the ‘kissing spot’, our converse twisted into the small space as I feel your smile against my lips.

I want to chase you through unknown cities and fall asleep in the back of a pick-up truck, our bodies tangled together, your hand lost in my hair, and nothing but the stars to keep us company.

I want to take pictures with you in front of the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum; I want goofy shots of you holding the leaning tower of Pisa between your fingers, and I want to nuzzle into you as we glide through the waters of Venice.

I want to stain every city with our love; I want to steal countries from your heart so they can only ever belong to us. I want to remember how alive and in love and insanely happy we were. I want to remember how my heart raced like the wind, how every morning I turned to look at you when waking in a new city, knowing it couldn’t get much better than this.

I want to disappear with you. I want the world to swallow us up.

I want to eat new foods with you in obscure restaurants by the ocean and I want to watch as your beautiful skin turns golden and the freckles scattered across my nose darken. I want to drive through country landscapes with the roof down while we sing along to all of our favurite songs, my feet on the dashboard and the wind in our hair. I want to feel your laugh radiate through me.

I want to stain every city with our love; I want to steal countries from your heart so they can only ever belong to us.

I want to sit in abandoned cafés drinking coffee with you as I scribble in my journal and you watch me with that loving curiosity in your eyes as I chew on the end of the pen, twirling the loose strands of my hair as I search my mind for the words to describe our days beneath the sun, lost in love but exactly where we need to be.

Let’s leave. Let’s run away from here, from all of the things that keep us from just being together. From losing time to the feel of our skin pressed together and learning every curve to each other’s lips. Our time on this earth is too short and our love too much for this lifetime. Let’s go, my love. Run away with me.