August Hasn’t Ended Yet

Dear Lucas,

Dear me...

I’ll start.

It was summer.

It always is, isn’t it?

The kind of summer when the nights feel borrowed and nobody asks what happens after August.

I met him somewhere between the sea and midnight.

He had salt on his skin, a cigarette burning between his fingers, and that careless way of looking at me as if he already knew how this would end.

Maybe we both did.

We spent our days pretending there was time.

Bare feet on hot stone. His shirt on my shoulders. Wine turning warm between us. Long drives with nowhere to go, windows down, music too loud — his hand finding mine without looking.

At night, everything became more dangerous.

We kissed like people trying to stop time.

And for a while, I believed we had.

There were things we never said. Perhaps because saying them would have made them real. Perhaps because some loves survive only as long as nobody asks them to become a life.

Then August ended.

There was no great goodbye.

No scene at a station.

No promises to find each other again.

Just one last morning, too bright for heartbreak.

He touched my face, smiled that impossible smile and said,

“You’ll be fine.”

I hated him for being right.

Years later, I can no longer remember the sound of his voice.

But sometimes, on the first unbearably hot night of summer, I open the windows and the air smells exactly as it did back then.

And for one second, I am twenty-something again.

He is beside me.

August has not ended yet.

And neither have we.

Just for the story of it.