I walked beside him to Oak Street Beach, unsure of why he had interrupted his afternoon to come and stand in the sand during the dregs of autumn, long after the last of summer’s saccharine memories had faded away. I was even more confused as to why I felt compelled to stand next to him, my lungs full of so much apprehension I feared I would cough out every ounce of my courage if I tried to take a deep breath. We stood for ten minutes or so, side by side on the sand, staring at the lake as the salty breeze lapped at our faces and chilled our bones. I was never one to fill the space with words, but as much as I didn’t know what to say, I knew I needed to speak, the weight of the endless moment too heavy to bear.

“Why are we here?” I asked, cringing at the croaked question, my voice waking up from its short hiatus to reflect how shaken I was by the scenery I often saw but rarely looked at, and by him, who I saw even when I tried not to look.

“I know why I’m here,” he replied, turning his head slightly to give me a smile I couldn’t comprehend. “Why are you?”

I didn’t know how to answer, so I sat down, no longer trusting my trembling legs.

Cal sat beside me but kept his eyes locked on the lake and the stone fruit sunset settling onto the horizon, dripping radiant reds and deep oranges into the water, ruby peaks swelling before they broke into a serene sea of sapphires capped with clusters of pearls.

Unexpectedly, Cal placed his palm over my mouth, shaking his head in amazement. “You’re breathing.”

Too flabbergasted to react, I exhaled a humid puff of air into his skin.

“How do you breathe?” he asked, removing his hand as if he wanted an answer to the rhetorical question. “Have you become so used to the sunsets that they don’t rob you of your breath anymore?”

“You’re speaking, so you're breathing,” I stated, knowing the statement was beside the point. “Have you?”

He shook his head and grinned at me. “I refuse to become desensitized by them. When you gaze at something enough, you can get used to it if you don’t remind yourself that it’s extraordinary, so I use my breath to remind myself of that—that it’s special, beautiful.”

He was too. I wanted to use my breath to tell him that, but I didn’t. I held it instead.

“I slept on the banks of the Mississippi for a month,” Cal stated, lying back so his body was propped up by only his elbows. “Four full weeks sleeping by the water.”

“Did you breathe?”

“I would have died if I didn’t,” he laughed. “It wasn’t like this. I had to survive then.”