first love
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He crossed an ocean while she crossed the distance between fear and sleep, meeting somewhere in the safety of a voice through a screen.
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Years disappear whenever one familiar name lights up her phone and her heart remembers how to be fourteen again.
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Before she even reads the message, her smile recognizes the name—proof that memory lives as much in the body as the mind.
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A photograph of a boy with a pelican becomes a doorway back to the voice that once crossed an ocean to make a frightened girl feel safe.
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At seventeen, safety arrived through a voice across the distance, leaving behind the ache of wondering what might have happened at another time.
Between Bruises & Blooms 