The Mint-Colored Echoes of Us

A single shard: the scent of coconut oil and sea salt clinging to my skin.
Another fragment: your laugh, recorded on a voice memo from three summers ago—low, rasping, like sand shifting underfoot. I am walking through this pastel city not as one woman, but as an assembly of moments held together by thin silk threads.
The mint robe billows behind me; it is less clothing and more a ghost following my every step. Each tile beneath my heels tells a different story: here is where we argued about the map in 2019; there is where you first touched the small of my back, your hand warm as sun-baked stone.
I wear these sunglasses not to shield my eyes from the Caribbean glare, but to frame the world into snapshots. I see us in every reflection—the window of a bakery, a polished car door—but we are never whole. We are always overlapping layers: you leaning in for a kiss while I’m already halfway gone; me laughing at something you haven't said yet.
The air is thick with heat and possibility. My skin hums under the sun, healing from winters spent in sterile offices and cold sheets.
I stop by a cafe chair—empty, orange plastic—and feel your presence like a phantom limb. You are not here, but you have never been more real than in this fragmented sunlight.
It is an urban romance written in gaps and silences: the space between my breath and yours across three time zones; the way I still walk at your pace even when walking alone.

Editor: Kaleidoscope