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It must have been a dream. In it, I wander unattended into the woodlands behind my family’s summer home. The air is so hot it clings to my shoulders; a veil of wildflowers, sage and sweet fennel.
My most cherished friend takes my hand and we run, laughing like children through fields of wild grasses. We splash in the water of a brook which carves the wood in two. It tumbles over large stones, and we skip smaller ones. We eat the fruit we’ve plucked from boughs we climbed barefoot. We sit next to each other to savor each bite and the hum of cicadas, kicking our legs while our hair dries.
“It’s just like a mirror,” I say to her when we laugh at each other’s stained lips. “We’re so alike, don’t you think?”
One day she tells me that I’m like the flicker of a pale candle flame, or a ripple in a still pool. A bright light in a perpetual dusk.
“There is no summer for me,” she says, “for there is no sun.” I fall asleep listening to her descriptions of a forgotten land, always dim and soft like a sunset —a kind of dark world she slips away from through a doorway in my shadow.
When I wake she is gone.
My fingers are so pink at the edges of my outstretched hands. I was so sure she’d just held them. My sighs are lost amidst the rustle of translucent leaves overhead. If I close my eyes, I can almost remember her face, obscured by the smattering sunlight between my fingers. Maybe she was only ever a ghost.
That night, I cannot sleep. I escape to the fields and call out to her beneath the stars. If her world has no sun as she says, then she must be here in this hazy clearing. My lantern is held above my head, swallowed at the edges by the silhouette of twisting branches.
“Here I am,” I whisper into the darkness, “Your bright light.”
“Like a mirror,” I hear her voice respond. “We’re so alike, don’t you think?”