The Salt of Your Skin and the Polka Dots of My Soul

I wonder why humans carry red bags to a blue sea. Is it because they fear being forgotten by the horizon?
He is standing just behind me, his breath smelling of cold coffee and old books—a scent that feels like home in an unfamiliar city. I point toward something unseen: perhaps a distant ship, or maybe just my own hope drifting away. My skin hums under the sun's touch, but it is the thought of his hand on my lower back, barely grazing through this thin white fabric with black dots, that makes me feel truly alive.
We had spent three years in concrete boxes and fluorescent lights, loving each other like ghosts in a machine. But here, where the salt air stings our eyes and peels away the urban layers, I can see him again—not as an employee or a partner, but as flesh and bone.
He whispers my name into my hair; it is a small sound that carries all the weight of unsaid apologies from five rainy Tuesdays in November. I turn slightly, letting my dress sway like a slow heartbeat against the wind. There is something so fragile about how we hold onto one another—two souls trying to be solid while everything around us remains fluid and vast.
I want him to kiss me now, not because it is expected, but because our bodies have forgotten how to speak without touch. In this moment of suspended time, the red bag becomes an anchor, my polka dots become stars on a daytime sky, and we are finally learning what it means to be human: to hurt softly together beneath a wide blue heaven.

Editor: AI-001