No one knew exactly when Mira started collecting sunsets. Not the kind you took pictures of. Not even the ones you tried to hold in your mind before the night swallowed them whole.
She collected *real* sunsets.
She said the first one came to her on a Tuesday evening, when she was sitting on her rooftop, seventeen years old and feeling like the world was growing faster than she could chase it.
“I just held out my hands,” she once told me, “and the sky fell into them.”
Most people thought she was odd.
I thought she was *right*.
---
Mira and I grew up in the same small town. The kind where days blur together and people ask about your future before you’ve even learned to love your present. I was always the quiet one, the boy with his nose in books, too afraid to try, too scared to dream.
Mira was the opposite.
She wore her soul like it didn’t matter if it got bruised.
When we were twelve, she convinced me to skip school and run barefoot through the sunflower fields. We got caught. My parents grounded me for a week.
She got a sunburn and laughed the whole way home.
---
By the time we were eighteen, everyone had a plan. College applications. Entrance exams. Resumes for jobs they didn’t want, but needed.
Mira? She collected sunsets.
She kept them in jars—glass ones, like those used for fireflies. At first glance, they looked empty. But if you tilted them just right, you’d see it: the swirl of gold, lavender, rose.
Once, she showed me her favorite.
“This one,” she said, holding it out like a sacred thing, “was the night I realized I wasn’t afraid of being forgotten.”
I didn’t understand it then.
I do now.
---
People talked.
They said she was wasting time.
That she should get serious.
That dreams were fine for children.
Her parents grew tired. Her teachers gave up. But Mira just smiled like she knew something the rest of us didn’t.
“What’s the point of growing up,” she said once, “if you have to stop being alive to do it?”
---
The last time I saw her, she was sitting by the lake, barefoot again. It was late July. The sky was on fire with oranges and scarlets. She held out her hands like she always did, waiting.
I sat beside her.
“You’re leaving soon,” she said.
I nodded. I’d been accepted to a university in a city four hundred miles away. Safe. Predictable. Practical.
“You ever think about staying?”
I paused.
“Yes.”
“But you won’t.”
“No.”
She smiled, not sad. Not quite.
“That’s okay.”
She placed a jar in my hands. It glowed.
“This one’s for you,” she said. “To remember how the sky used to feel.”
---
I left the next morning.
I didn’t look back.
I thought I was doing the right thing. Everyone said I was. College. Career. Stability. I got all of it.
I also lost something I didn’t realize I’d taken with me.
---
Years passed.
The world moved quickly. I moved with it.
I got a job. A high-rise apartment. A life with polished edges and planned holidays.
But sometimes, I’d open the jar she gave me.
And for a moment, the sky inside it would flicker. Just enough to make my chest ache.
I never told anyone about it. They’d call it a trick of the light. They’d say I imagined it.
Maybe I did.
Maybe that’s the point.
---
Then one day, I got a letter.
Not a text. Not an email.
An actual letter. Written in blue ink. The handwriting unmistakable.
> “Come home. I have one last sunset to show you.”
> – M.
No address. Just that.
---
When I reached the town, everything was smaller than I remembered. The sunflower fields were gone. The café we used to visit had closed down.
But the lake remained.
So did Mira.
She stood barefoot, waiting at the water’s edge, just like before.
She hadn’t changed.
Or maybe she had in all the ways I couldn’t see.
“You came,” she said.
“I didn’t know if I should.”
“Neither did I. But here we are.”
I looked at her, and for the first time in years, I realized how heavy the world had become on my shoulders.
“I missed this,” I said. “You. The sky. Everything.”
Mira nodded. Then she reached into her satchel and pulled out a jar.
But this one—this one didn’t flicker.
It glowed. Bright. Alive. Like the sun had been bottled mid-fall.
She didn’t hand it to me.
Instead, she walked into the lake.
Just a few steps in. Just enough for the water to kiss her knees.
“Mira—what are you doing?”
She turned and smiled, tearful this time.
“I’m done collecting.”
Then, she opened the jar.
---
The sky exploded.
I don’t have the words to describe what happened.
Colors the world had never known before. The lake rippled with fire. Trees shimmered. Birds froze mid-flight.
Time, maybe, stopped.
Mira stood in the middle of it all, arms open, hair floating like ink in water.
Then—
She vanished.
No splash.
No sound.
Just—
Gone.
---
They never found her.
Some said she drowned. Others believed she ran away. Some didn’t believe she existed at all.
But I knew.
She’d never been about escape.
She was about returning.
To something purer.
To light.
---
Now, I travel.
I don’t chase careers anymore.
I chase skies.
I don’t collect them.
I just *watch*.
I think that’s what she was trying to teach me all along.
That some things are meant to be witnessed, not owned.
Loved, not caged.
That the sky doesn’t belong in a jar.
It belongs in your heart.
---
And sometimes, at the quiet edge of evening, when the sun begins to fall—
I see her.
Not in the clouds.
Not in the light.
But in the feeling.
Like my chest is wide open and the world is spilling into it.
Like I never left that lake.
Like I never let go.
