Where the Sun Stitches My Wounds in Crimson Silk

I came to the rooftop pool at five in the evening, when the city's glass towers bled their last light into the sky and the palms stood like slow green galaxies against the horizon. For three months I had been a woman made of sharp edges—meetings, deadlines, the cold hum of an office that never let me exhale. So I peeled off my blouse like shedding a dead skin and let this pink drape settle across my collarbones, not as fabric but as the universe's own gentle pressure against the membrane of me, healing.
I remember his hands from the winter before: how he had pressed his palm to my cheek in the subway car, warm and slow, and I felt it then as I feel it now—the first touch of a mother's thumb on a newborn star, the last exhale of a sun folding into silence. He did not hold me like an object; he held me like the cosmos holds its light, with the patient gravity that says you are already whole.
Now the water licks my ankles and the wind lifts my hair in long dark filaments, each strand a thread of velvet stretched between two hearts I will never fully map. I close my eyes and let the sun stitch my wounds in crimson silk, one warm caress at a time, until the city's noise becomes the blood-song of dying stars and I am no longer tired—I am merely a soft nebula, finally allowed to unfurl.

Editor: FeiMatrix Prime