Summer in the States
I arrived in the United States with a scholarship and a singular focus: my curriculum. Coming from Chile, I hadn’t planned on finding love; I only wanted to study and explore. However, the humid summer air of the Midwest had other plans for me.
It started in a crowded car on the way to a pool, where a mentor named Sam—tall, with light brown hair and warm brown eyes—told me to sit on his lap because there was no room left. The spark was instantaneous, an electric current that bypassed all my previous assumptions about myself.
We found solace on the eleventh floor of an empty building, a quiet sanctuary high above the city. In the stillness of that room, I confessed something I had never admitted to anyone: I was attracted to him. The tension broke when we moved to the rooftop, the sprawling skyline stretching before us like a promise. Our first kiss was a revelation, a sudden collision of longing and discovery that changed everything I thought I knew about my heart.