I did something rather unorthodox that night, something that I never usually did. For some reason that night, I was compelled to walk out on to my apartment terrace. There was a city-wide power outage, and the sights of the stars littering the night sky had caught my attention. The way the stars glimmered enthralled me and the way they blended into the violet backdrop made it feel like a blurry dream. I had never seen anything so beautiful as I did that night, but that was because my city was a city that never slept. With the amount of light pollution that was generated, I don't think that I had ever seen the stars once while living there. As I rested my hands over the terrace ledge, I remembered thinking about taking out my phone to capture the rare moment.

However, I knew that those pictures would just be for my own pleasure. I had lived alone for the last four years, ever since my parents passed away. They were frugal people and it showed in the inheritance I received. At the time of my parents' sudden death, I opted to live by myself. I was a male on the edge of becoming 18, and it was a point in time when I was about to become an adult. Thus, I realized that I had to start acting like one and didn't want to burden anyone with my grief. It wasn't that a hard of a decision, because I didn't really have any friends. It even remained that way after starting college. I just went to classes and returned home before the stars came out. I didn't even know the names of my apartment neighbors, much alone know what they looked like.

I never joined any clubs at school and kept to myself during lectures. I never even had an opportunity to make friends at a part-time job. This was because there was never any reason for me to work. My inheritance was big enough that I could support myself through school and I even had enough to support myself for the rest of my life. The only downside to my situation was that it left me a lot of free time to do absolutely nothing. I spent each ordinary day repeating the same process of going to school, commuting home, studying, and sleeping.

I who had lost my parents on the cusp of adulthood learned to walk by myself. For a long time, it had just been me against the world, and I had grown accustomed to that.

Then that all changed one night, the night when I walked out on to the apartment terrace. While I was staring listlessly at the world above, a shooting star trailed across the night sky. Then in that brief moment, before the shooting star disappeared, I made a wish. I could have wished for anything, but for some reason, my heart compelled me to say,

"I wish for a person to talk with"

Unbeknownst to me back then, that same wish was simultaneously being made on the same shooting star. That shooting star would lead to an unexplainable chain of events, that would culminate into me forming a friendship for the first time. However, just like how a shooting star was fleeting, that was the best way to explain my friendship with this person. To me, the friendship was alluring, because it was temporary. Even if the time spent was ephemeral, the memories we created would linger, for as long as I lived.

That night when a star shot across the sky, it marked the start of an unforgettable summer.

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