Sunbeam

She stood, ankle deep, in the little lake. 

The sun held her like an old friend, summer embracing her like it was happy to see her. Like it didn’t make sweat roll down the back of her neck. Like it didn’t sweeten her blood for the mosquitos that loved to blemish the skin of her legs, no matter how much bug spray she put on. 

Like it would never end. Of course, she knew that every summer was just a visitor. Excited to come. Destined to leave.

Fated to fade away.

She went to the lake almost every day. After hours of sitting alone in her room, of days working from home that bled into weeks and months of nothingness, the lake was the only thing that kept her sane. When she couldn’t see her friends, or couldn’t go the places she used to go, the lake was always there for her. The evergreens and the rocks, the little fish that swam around her feet and the gentle breeze, those things that she never appreciated until she had to. Until they were the only things left to appreciate these days.

The heat was relentless, and even in the coolness of the water she could feel her skin burning. She lowered her hands to the surface and cupped them. The water slipped out from her fingers and rippled around in circles, inching away until it smoothed out to reflect the whites of her eyes. The curve of her mouth. The hair that looked like strands of gold in the light of day. 

Sunbeam. That’s what he used to call her. His sunbeam.

“You know what you are,” he said to her once last summer, his fingers in her hair, their legs intertwined in the bed of his old truck as the sun went down over the lake. “You’re like sunlight.”

“Could you be any more cheesy?” she laughed. She put a hand on his face to push it playfully away from hers when he tried to kiss her. “Are you going to compare the shine of my skin to the moon next? Are my eyes as bright as the stars?”

He rolled his eyes, the ones that sent an electric current down her gut every time they looked at her.

“You know, I try to be romantic and all I get is your sass. Maybe I should just keep my mouth shut from now on, huh?” he said, but his mouth shifted into a lazy sort of grin, the kind she usually liked to kiss off of him. 

“No, no. Tell me. Why am I like sunlight,” she demanded, fluttering her eyelashes at him as dramatically as she could, like one of those actresses in an old black and white film.

“Nah. You’ll just make fun of me.”

“I always make fun of you. C’mon. Please?”

He let out an audible, intentional sigh. She laughed and leaned over to kiss his cheek. “Tell me,” she said again, giving him a little push on the arm.

He watched her for a few moments until he caved. “It’s just…you know, when it’s a really good summer day?” he murmured, his eyes focused on their feet. His face was getting dangerously red. 

“Sure…”

“And you’re outside, and the sun is shining, and everything just feels possible. It’s warm. Bright. Fills you up and you wish you could just bottle that feeling to keep in your pocket for the rest of the year, for when it gets cold, and dark…that’s how you make me feel.”

A drunk, hazy sort of cloud filled her head at his words. She expected to laugh, to poke his side and give him shit for being so cutesy. She didn’t expect to feel like fire, like her elation could consume everything around her at any moment. She kissed him, her fingertips against his burning cheeks.

“Too cheesy?” he asked, sheepish, when she pulled away.

“Absolutely,” she said. She smiled so hard that her face started to hurt. 

It was the most incredible thing anyone had ever said to her.

She didn’t expect that one day, he’d take those beautiful words back.

She took her hands out of the water and dried them on her shorts. She nudged the phone in her pocket. She still kept it on her at all times, pretending like she wasn’t waiting for it to ring. To buzz. For his name to light up the blackness of her screen in the dark. For his voice to fill her ears like a sad, sweet tune she hadn’t heard in years but had never forgotten the words to.

They used to go to the lake every weekend. Before he moved away for his new job. Before the world fell apart. Before staying at home, before travel bans and restrictions and cities that never felt further apart than they did now. Before missed calls and months without touch. Before excuses. 

“It just feels like we’re so far away from each other now,” he told her, over the phone, three months into quarantine. She could hear the television on in the background. Could hear the voices of new friends down the hall from him. “I moved at the wrong time. This long-distance thing just…isn’t working for me.”

“I’m not working for you,” she said quietly, to herself, long after the phone call ended and the dark night stole the summer sun from the sky. 

And so she went to the lake, the only place where she didn’t have to cover her mouth with a mask. The only place where she felt like she still had him. She could see them jumping off of the dock, fully clothed. She felt his arms around her, his mouth wet on her bare shoulder. They danced on the grassy shore, the radio's lullaby playing out of the truck’s open windows. He kissed her nose. Her eyes. He looked at her like he never wanted to look at anything else ever again.

Until, like the lake water cupped in her hands, he slipped through the cracks.

They were like summer. It’s always beautiful. It always ends.