At three in the morning, her phone screen was still lit. She hesitated for three minutes over the words "Good night" in the chat box, then finally changed them to "I'm going to sleep. You should get some rest soon, too." The other person replied instantly: "The moon will watch over you for me." A smirking emoji followed, like a mint candy tossed into the lake of her heart, sending out a tingling, ticklish ripple.
The last message ended with "Let's leave it at that." The chat still held a message from last winter, when she was living at school, saying she'd brought home a roasted sweet potato and missed me. The image was a little blurry.
I once thought saying "Good morning" to each other was more certain than sunrise. I thought the shared watchlist in our favorites would keep growing forever. Then one day, even asking "What did you eat today?" became a question that needed careful thought.
The day I deleted her contact, the weather was as lovely as it had been when we first met. The wind swept through the empty street, just like the warmth of her fingertips when she first took my hand. Some people really can only walk part of the way with you, like the movie we never finished watching in early winter that year, the goodbye we never managed to say, and the two of us who never had the chance to grow up.
Theme: Love knows no gender
