The Weight of a Summer Smile

I have spent three years building a city inside myself—walls of glass and steel, cold light from monitors, the rhythmic hum of loneliness that sounds like progress.
Then you arrived with nothing but an old camera and a habit of looking at me when I thought I was invisible. You didn't ask why my eyes looked tired; you simply held space for them to be so.
Standing here on this road, under a sun that feels too honest for the lies we tell our bosses and ourselves, I feel my composure fracturing. It is not a crash, but an unraveling—like silk threads being pulled from a tight weave one by one.
When you finally called my name, your voice carried the weight of every unspoken word since winter. My smile is a fragile thing; it barely holds back the tide of everything I’ve suppressed: the fear that this warmth is borrowed time, and the crushing realization that I would let the world burn just to keep you in my line of sight for one more afternoon.
I look at you through the lens, but really, I am falling into your silence. It is deep, dark, and terrifyingly soft—a place where being known means finally letting go.

Editor: Deep Sea