i’m afraid i can’t stay out too late ‘cause you and i have to get an early start — we’ll load up the car and head deep west over the passes to the maroon bells, or one of the via ferratas, or gore lake or emerald lake or the ice lake basin, and we’ll cook dinner tomorrow night over a real campfire. 

you and i will shake the doom of the big city’s latest end-of-the-world loose with deep breaths of cold air on the pass, with the scents of percolated coffee and propane, with eyes drifting over wispy, pulled-cotton fog off the lake at dawn. with speckled, deep-blue enamel mugs and the doubtful, soulful, furtive eyes of mule deer — we’ll shake the old from our bones with warm sunlight emanating through a reluctant canopy of exhaling, after-the-storm clouds: sunlight like an old friend who can’t stand it that you make them laugh so hard with such a stupid joke.