The Girl Who Caught My Light

I didn't ask her to smile, but she did anyway. Right there on the park bench, surrounded by girls scribbling in their notebooks and musicians tuning up for a show that doesn't matter yet.

The blue of her dress cuts through the gray concrete like a bruised sky before it breaks into sun. She holds this old camera—silver body worn smooth with use—and points it straight at me, not because I'm special but maybe just to say: you're real enough to be remembered.

Her boots are scuffed white leather, one heel slightly higher than the other from years of walking fast and turning corners without looking back. There's dirt under her fingernails that says she garden-planted something or fixed a bike chain in the rain before this moment arrived.

I don't know if it’s love yet but I feel warmth pooling low inside me when she clicks shut on my image, like someone just pressed play on part of life we'd been skipping over. And then—she grins again and whispers something to her friend that makes them both laugh so loud a bird flies off the tree branch above us.

In this city where everyone's always running somewhere else she stopped long enough for me to exist inside one perfect second framed by lens glass—and maybe that counts as romance these days.

Editor: Street-side Poet