chapter 15
On my way home, I bought a single peach even though it wasn’t the season, and it tasted like exactly what it was: a longing for a summer that would come back if I waited.
At home, I opened the window and let the air in. I put on music and chopped garlic. I called my father and told him the soup needed more salt. I texted Jen a photo of the wildflower poster someone had peeled half off and still somehow looked lovely.
Before bed, I pulled out the index card I’d made anew, fresh paper, my handwriting steady. The list was short.
Take care of what I love.
Make good work.
Be kind without being erased.
Learn one new thing a year.
See the ocean from the other side again.
I taped it to the wall with washi tape that didn’t match anything. When I turned off the light, it glowed faintly in the spill from the street, like the morning before mornings learned how to be hard.
In the quiet, I thought briefly of Daniel, not with bitterness, not with nostalgia, but the way you think of a road you took to get here: the bends, the bumps, the one beautiful overlook you could never find again if you tried.
Then I thought of Ashley, and even that thought was small, a faraway light that had nothing to do with how I slept.
I slept.
In my dream, I was standing on a beach where the tide drew small elegant lines in the sand and erased them gently. The sky held itself together without my effort. A camera sat on a tripod, pointed at the horizon, and nobody stood behind it. The shutter clicked by itself, every few minutes, taking pictures for the joy of watching light change.
I went closer, curious, and the camera showed me what it had caught: not my face, not anyone’s, just a strip of sea and a scribble of cloud and a gull that had flown in at the exact moment the shutter fell and looked surprised to be immortal.
I woke up laughing, the good kind, the kind you have to put your hand over your mouth for.
The city was morning. The stove ticked with heat. My phone lay face down and quiet. My room smelled like eucalyptus and soap.
I made coffee. I fed the future a peach pit to see what it would do. I put on running shoes and tied them tight. I stood at the door, hand on the knob, heart steady.
Then I opened it, stepped out, and let the day do what days do when you stop asking them to be something else.