When I awoke I found myself lying on the beach, a pair of shimmering gray eyes staring at me.

I was dreaming again.

“I missed you while you were gone,” he said, as he stood over me and extended an arm out to me to help me up.

I used his arm to pull myself up into the sitting position and patted the sandy ground next to me, to indicate that he should sit as well.

“I missed you, too,” I said hesitantly, as I leaned my head onto his shoulder and stared out at the waves as they crashed onto the shore. I felt his body tense as he heard the hesitation in my voice.

“You’ve never said that to me before. We’ve never had a real conversation, it’s usually me talking and you listening...,” I trailed off.

“Last night was the first night you didn’t cry.” He reached for my hand and held it. “I gave you the listening ear and open heart you needed to help you grieve. I held you as you sobbed. Being close to you is enough for me—it always has been since I began to exist.” His thumb gently caressed my hand as he spoke.

“I’ve never even asked your name...”

“You haven’t given me one,” he said softly.

I lifted my head up to look at him. My eyes traced his handsome features. His dark brown, almost black, hair was perfectly coiffed and pushed back out of his face, which made the task of admiring him easy.

“I have to give you a name?” My voice sounded as incredulous as I felt. He turned to look at me, his gray eyes locking onto mine.

“I began to exist because you needed me. You longed for a companion, someone you could trust with your darkest secrets and your weakest moments—someone who could love you, not despite your flaws, but because of them. You made a wish... and I began to exist.”

I closed my eyes as I tried to remember. I started to dream of him several weeks ago when I had been feeling at my lowest, as I did my best to avoid dealing with my grief. I tried to hide it, to repress it. I was too ashamed to let anyone see me cry. I held myself together because I hadn’t wanted to burden anyone with all of my feelings. I’d folded myself, my real self, up like a piece of origami and tucked it behind the proverbial mask I wore every day.

“I felt lost,” I said, and as I did the words felt heavy on my tongue.

“Because you were sad,” he said.

“Once I was done folding I made a wish on the jar of origami stars. I folded them every day after my mom died—sometimes folding one a day, other times more depending on how I felt. When I reached three hundred and sixty-five stars I made a wish.”



(Mid-January) A month and a half ago…

I sat at my desk, opening the box the mailman had left on our doorstep. The package had been addressed to me, with no return address. I was curious because I hadn’t ordered anything online.

I opened the package and found a Hermes jar and several packages of beautiful glittery origami paper strips, meant to be folded into lucky stars. I gasped, overwhelmed by nostalgia.

When Mom was first diagnosed last year, we spent hundreds of hours folding origami cranes and lucky stars together, to wish for an improvement in her health. We knew that it was silly but it was hope that kept us on task. When she died I threw them all away. Kai must have bought this for me as a way to show me that I should never give up, to not give up hope that things would get better.

I closed my eyes and imagined the first time she taught me how to fold a lucky star. I was twelve.

“Mom, I can’t do it,” I said in frustration as I threw the mangled strips of origami paper away. “I’ll never be able to fold a star.” I frowned.

She smiled patiently at me. “You can’t give up so easily. If you really want to learn how to do this, you need to keep practicing. I believe in you,” she said as she showed me how to fold a star again.

It had taken me days and what seemed like hundreds of strips of paper but in the end, I had been able to fold my first lopsided star, all because she believed in me.

I opened the first packet of paper and started folding. Maybe someday I’d be able to hope again…



“That night, you dreamt of me for the first time,” he said as he caressed my hand.

Against my will, I felt tears well up in my eyes. But they weren’t tears of sadness… I was happy to know that, at least in my dreams, I would never feel alone again.

“What about Nox?”

His brow furrowed in confusion. “Nox?”

“For your name,” I explained, “It means ‘night’ in Latin.” I had first seen the word in one of the Harry Potter books, and it had always stuck with me.

He reached up to wipe away my tears. “Nox,” he mused. “What an appropriate name you’ve chosen for me, my Hikari,” he said, calling me by my Japanese name which meant ‘light.’

“My Hikari,” he repeated.

“I heard what you said last night, but I-I didn’t acknowledge it because I didn’t know if you’d meant for me to hear it.” Even though I hadn’t replied out loud I knew, in my heart, that I loved him too.

Nox didn’t say anything in reply. Instead, he leaned toward me and crushed his lips against mine, and for the first time ever we kissed. But it felt like so much more than a kiss. There was something primal and raw behind it. The kiss caused an electrical surge, a shock, to go through my body. It was wonderful. I felt different, as though something had awoken inside of me.

It was my heart.

My heart had felt devoid of all the sorrow I’d been carrying, all of my pain and my grief. I felt lighter, secure, but most of all I felt cherished in a way that I never had before. I saw now that there was light at the end of the tunnel.

Nox’s love gave me hope.



Nox and I sat together, watching the sun rise over the horizon.

“I want to live in this moment forever,” I said with a sigh. A sort of whimsical happiness filled my heart as I spoke.

Nox smirked boyishly at me, which only served to emphasize his impossibly deep and adorable dimples. “If we did just think of the infinite moments we’d miss out on, all the missed opportunities to get to know each other better because we chose to remain frozen in a single moment.”

He was so cute when he smiled like that. It made my tummy butterflies do loop-the-loops.

Nox was right. Why would I want to live forever in one moment when we had so many more wonderful moments ahead of us? I shook my head at the impulsiveness of my words and smiled.

“You’re right, but you can’t blame me for wanting to re-live the night I had the world’s best first kiss over and over,” I said with a pause, then added, “not to mention, watching the sunrise together. It’s all so romantic.”

He squeezed my hand. “No, I certainly couldn’t,” he said as he leaned over to kiss me once more. “I love you, more than anything. All I want is for you to be happy, always.”

It felt like my heart had started beating, really beating, again for the first time in months.