Paper Girl

I’d searched for her in the cracks of sidewalks, in crowded train stations, in the way strangers’ hair caught the light. I never found her. So I started building her from memory fragments and daydreams—yellowed ticket stubs, scraps of love notes, the sound of a song I could never quite remember. Layer by layer, paint over paper, I made her. I gave her eyes from the sky just before a storm, a smile from the first summer I fell in love, hands that held both fire and gentleness. And when I looked up from my work, there she was—not just on the paper, but standing there. As if the act of imagining her had been enough to summon her into my world.