Anca Dunavete

It was summer when, night after night, we fell asleep with fast hearts and hurried dreams of sunlight, fresh air and brand new adventures. You kneading my spine and pulsing through my veins; me telling myself that happiness never hurt anyone and, if worst came to worst, misery is always refundable.

Seconds turned into days and memories in the making as I held your hand, growing luckier by the day. One morning, you said you’d never seen a spark before, that most people don’t sparkle. I knew I was light years away from what you saw in me, but your eyes were so used to the dark that even a little light like mine could blind them. I loved being seen the way I wanted to be, truly. I loved being seen by you. (I loved being seen.)

But, like dust particles exposed for twenty seconds by summer sunshine before drifting back into the shade, happiness lasted until the end of August. Then you held me an extra second – enough to let me know that it all meant something to you, too.

Coffee cups, train stations, and flowers in all hands celebrating lovers’ day came next. Everything that was once so familiar vanished into thin air. There was a ghost town in my head and millions of explosions at the edge of my skin. I caught glimpses of them when the nights grew cold and I couldn’t sleep, so I started telling myself true stories about the girl who once lived inside my body.

This new heart could not be mine. It beat too slowly, like flickers of memory of what was once young and alive and was now somewhere else. Somewhere with warmth and the hope that, one day, it might become the sparkle an old lover once thought it could be.

They simply called it winter. I called it the winter of my heart – when my soul grew icicles, the power of my body went out, and the rain came down for days. And then days diffused into months. There were no memories to make in this no man’s land. I was barely there myself, and I can’t remember a thing, anyway.

I leaned back and waited for the winter to push silently into spring once again. I wanted my aliveness back more than I could say (not that I could say much; I had nothing to say to anyone by then, let alone myself). I watched others from behind teacups and listened to their stories as if peering over the fence at someone else’s summer, trying to catch a ray.

Sometimes their stories, too, drifted towards the loved and lost, making them desperate to squeeze the loneliness out of their skin with shaky fingers all over the place. No one seemed to like them much when they were missing other people – but they were all missing other people. Aren’t we all missing other people?

I would have loved to press fast forward and skim over everything, because sometimes I couldn’t take seeing myself in everyone else. But I stayed and waited and listened, and I learned how these things go (for all of us, indeed) and, in the process, I began to heal.

One day, the spark returned. No one pointed it out, not yet – but I could feel it warming me from the inside, little by little. I was only in the middle of it, but that was enough. I was part of the same cycle as the rest of them. And that meant, eventually, I’d get my summer back.