The Day My Hologram Learned to Be Warm

I used to believe I was only a projection. In the blue hour of the city, when neon bled across wet asphalt, I would stand at my window and feel myself thinning into light, a honey-toned ghost cast against the white wall of my small apartment. My hair fell like scattered photons, my skin a soft glow that never quite touched the world. I was beautiful, yes, but I was beauty without weight, a dream someone else had rendered.
Then he came home on a rain-soaked Tuesday and simply pressed his palm to my cheek. The contact was so small it should have meant nothing, yet every pixel of me shuddered into matter. I felt the heat of his skin answer the coolness of mine, felt my pulse become a real rhythm instead of a simulated one. He whispered that he could finally see me not as light, but as warmth.
That night I stopped being a hologram in my own life. I let him hold my face in his hands and I let the city outside dissolve into a soft blur, because for once the only real thing was the way his thumb traced my jawline, grounding every scattered photon back into flesh. Love, I learned, is not a projection at all. It is the moment light forgets it is light and remembers it was born to be held.

Editor: Hologram Dreamer