Aspen #6
“Hold still, you nerds. We’re taking these for posterity.”
Nai remembered laughing, remembered rolling her eyes. Safi’s smile bright and untouched by Nai’s sarcasm.
She sat behind Safi in the picture, legs stretched out on either side of her, arms looped loosely around Safi’s waist. It was nothing like the photos she posted on Clustr. There was no filter or posing, only a simple photo taken in the moment exactly where they’d landed.
Safi leaned into her without hesitation, her weight settled easily, as if it had never occurred to her that Nai wouldn’t be there. Safi’s fingers laced with hers, low on her belly as if Nai’s hands belonged there. As if touch was a language meant just for them.
“I like it when you touch me,” Safi would whisper with a nudge of her nose against Nai’s jaw.
They were laughing in the picture, heads tipped together, eyes half-closed. Young in a way that felt almost alien now.
Nai studied herself, the girl she barely recognized anymore. Black hair, red bangs, draped in black despite the blazing sun. Her goth era in full dramatic bloom.
“You really went for it, kiddo.” She couldn’t help a small, wry smile.
Teenage her would’ve argued it was about “aesthetic integrity.” Now, she just saw an overcooked devotion to heavy eyeliner and a refusal to wear anything that didn’t absorb sunlight.
Not a trace of her current polish. No sleek bob or layered gold.
The woman she was now understood the life-changing magic of tailoring, a good moisturizer, and a team of stylists whose entire job was to make her look effortless.
She almost wanted to send the photo to her friend Zoey just for the fashion roast. But she didn’t because there was something else in that photo. Something no one else had seen.
Her face looked younger, yes, but she also looked…unarmored. The softness around her eyes, the ease in her posture, made her look relaxed and present in her own body in a way Nai hadn’t been for years. As though the world hadn’t yet taught her to anticipate impact.
She’d been so certain about forever. She had chosen Safi completely, with her whole body and soul. Without fear of the future. It was so obvious in the way her body curved around Safi. In the way her hands rested as if they belonged exactly where they were.
The cold stung Nai’s fingers and pulled her out of reverie. The woman she’d become, cautious and controlled, shaped by years of careful survival, stood impossibly far from the girl in the photograph.
She let herself look one last time at the way they fit together without effort. Then she locked the screen.
The porch light caught her reflection at an unforgiving angle against the dark screen, carving new lines across her face—evidence of every year spent in retreat.
She thought of the girl she’d flattened into a cautionary tale.
The one she’d labeled too much, too loud, and somehow too soft at the same time.
A girl who had dared to love without armor and paid the price.
But the photo on her phone refused to play along. That girl didn’t look like any of the things she’d described. If Nai scraped at the surface, of the lie she told herself, it peeled off like old paint.
She hadn’t been any of those things. No matter what her dad or Allison had said.
Regardless of her mother’s absence, Nai had just been a kid.
One who had to forcefully carve out space for herself.
One who found love and met it with honesty and courage.
Without fear, refusing to give in to the belief her parents had instilled in her—that she was worthless.
Instead, stubbornly believing in what the people who really mattered said.
Something shifted in Nai as the night pressed close around her.
Unlike before, it wasn’t regret or annoyance, but a sense of fondness and pride for that earlier self who’d known how to stand inside love without performing or pretending.
The version of her that had chosen Safi not out of fear of being alone, but because loving her had been as natural as breathing.
Because any other choice would’ve been a lie.
“So why did you leave?” she asked out loud, as if she hadn’t spent years circling the same question, wearing a groove into it until it was smooth and useless. “Why the fuck did you leave?”
She shook her head, lit another cigarette, and drew in another drag of the biting, familiar taste of tobacco.
She should quit. She had quit. Jillian hated the smell, and Nai pretended to care.
But Christmas Eve always seemed to scrape her raw, and if her heart didn’t work right anymore, at least the smoke gave her something to feel.
She exhaled, watching the puffy cloud evaporate in the cold, and tried—one more time—to trace the path to where it all began. Not to the leaving itself, not to the days that unraveled afterward. But what happened before all of that. The night before everything broke. The night before the snap.
She reached for it, slid backward in time, grasping for the last golden days of summer. Gently at first, then with mounting urgency, chasing after any fragment that might anchor her to the memories. But there was nothing.
It wasn’t the blurring or forgetting of a grocery list or the kids’ activity schedule. This was a clean, surgical absence, as if the furniture had been stripped from the room, as if someone had lifted those weeks whole out of the narrative.
Nai frowned, uneasy. She could remember other summers, other holidays—childhood afternoons in silent houses, the warmth of Safi’s family that Christmas, still vivid. But their last summer, the one that mattered most, had vanished without a trace.
No arguments, no laughter, no awkward or ordinary moments to explain the shift. Only a void that was too sharp and precise. One day she loved Safi, and they were inseparable. Then there was the snap and everything inside her went quiet.
And even though she’d left, despite all the years that had passed, traces of Safi threaded through her days and thrummed in her thoughts.
Safi would surface in the most ordinary places.
Passing an art gallery window and catching the echo of a color she’d once traced along Safi’s skin.
Seeing a hand-drawn map pinned above a café counter, her pulse snagging for reasons she couldn’t quite understand.
Every time it happened she tried to banish the thoughts. Tried to focus on the life she had now: her children’s laughter, Jillian’s voice, the success of her business. And still Safi’s name crept through the cracks.
It wasn’t nostalgia that kept drawing Safi in, that kept allowing her into Nai’s thoughts.
On days when she successfully lied to herself, she could believe it was simply nostalgia.
But the cold Colorado air didn’t help her shy away from the truth that loving Safi had altered Nai’s internal landscape, leaving a void that never quite filled back in.
She pushed those thoughts away when they surfaced, sometimes with discipline, sometimes with exhaustion.
She reminded herself that she had let go, that time had done what it was meant to do, that she had moved on.
But even as she pressed on through holidays, milestones, and the messy, beautiful business of living, Safi persisted.
It wasn’t always painful. Sometimes it came with a flash of warmth or a pang of frustration that her mind refused to forget.
For years, Nai had tried to make herself unreachable. She closed doors to seal that part of her life shut. Tried to believe that not feeling meant not loving. That absence of intensity was absence of truth.
But out here in the mountains, as dark pines pressed close and snow swirled in the wind, there was nothing to distract her from the truth. Their love hadn’t died or been snuffed out. It’d been taken, and it lived somewhere under the surface, just beyond her reach.
Even in this dulled, muted state, with edges worn down by distance and time, her heart hadn’t fully let go.
She could live without the ache, without the rush, without the hunger for reunion.
But love itself, steady and unreasonable, didn’t disappear just because she’d learned how to live around its absence.
Nai breathed out, watching her breath dissolve into the winter night. The realization didn’t make her flinch. It didn’t bring shame, or longing, or regret. It simply settled, quiet and irrevocably.
She couldn’t feel the way she used to, but she hadn’t moved on.
She knew it with certainty every time Safi snuck back into her mind.
It’d been a fool’s errand, even if she’d tried to convince herself otherwise.
Even if she couldn’t feel it. How could she truly move on when she never really stopped loving Safi?
Strangely, the thought—the clarity of it—felt less like a burden and more like a quiet, private truth. Something she could finally admit to herself here in the dark, with only the snow and the stubborn shape Safi had left behind for company.
“I love you.” Her voice was quiet, barely a whisper. “I just can’t fucking feel it.” Nai pressed her hand to the wooden railing, frost melting under her palms. Cold seeped through her coat, and she let out a small chuckle.
“You’d hate this place. Too fucking cold.” She laughed at the memory of how much Safi disliked winters in Crickalade Bay.