The Starfish I Wore for a Summer That Refused to End

The afternoon light falls across my skin like a slow exhale, and I let it. Below me the city hums its ordinary hymn of traffic and glass towers, but up here on this terrace the air still tastes of salt from a summer I never quite left behind. I lift my hand to my chin, the way he taught me to pose in front of his camera, and feel the cool silver starfish resting against my collarbone. He gave it to me on a beach where the waves were patient and our laughter was the only map we needed; he said, keep this so that whenever you are cold, you can touch it and remember what warmth actually weighs.

I have worn it through every lonely winter of this city, through meetings that drained me, through nights when I scrolled his name and felt time fold in on itself. People say love is a thing of the present, but my heart has always argued otherwise. It lives in the past tense and the future tense at once, a confession whispered across years without ever being spoken aloud to another soul.

So today, with honey-blonde hair loose in the wind and a black stone necklace catching the sun like a quiet promise, I am finally ready to answer it. Not with words, but by stepping down into the living world, where perhaps he is waiting too, carrying his own starfish, his own nostalgia. The light is golden, my nails are painted for no one in particular and for someone very much so, and I think that love, true love, does not expire. It only changes seasons. And this one, at last, feels like the warm kind.

Editor: South Wind