The summer I turned pretty

Erina Islam is an XI student of humanities at Adamas School, Kolkata.
She is interested in literature and the arts.

Last winter was freezing, lonely, dark – all at once. I was wandering for a house that wouldn’t melt when the sun rose. The emptiness of the season had settled in my chest in a way that it refused to leave, even when I covered myself with blankets with my fragile, shivering hands. I sipped silence like hot chocolate, and the winds howled with every step I took. Life felt like a horror movie that kept playing on loop. People were as false as the houses made of ice — deception so beautiful, but always temporary. People changed their minds, or forgot to answer, or left mid-sentence. I told myself that all winters end, but I gripped onto my jacket a little too tightly, afraid I wouldn’t make it out of this one.

And then came summer.

When I was huddled in the corner of my room, scared that anything I touched would melt– the first rays of the sun slipped through the windows and caressed the tips of my fingers. I saw the way it lit up the room, the way the light took up all the empty space and provided a kind of warmth I had been craving all my life. The air stopped feeling like knives, and the places around me felt less like strangers. I was scared. After months of flinching from shadows, the sun felt too bright, too loud.

But I let it touch other parts of me. I let the warmth settle on my shoulders when I was used to feeling small. I let the warmth envelope my hands when I held a cup of coffee, afraid it would burn me, but it didn’t.

It started with small things.

Laughter that bubbled up from somewhere deep, uncoiled from the ribs without needing permission.

I stepped outside without a jacket, with arms that didn’t carry grief anymore.

And then, there was my name. Soft, tentative, spoken like a gift, not barked or blamed or forgotten—just said gently, with care.

I wrote poems and didn’t delete them. I let them live on the pages.

And people noticed.

Not just in the way you notice someone’s haircut, but in the way you notice the rainbow adorning the sky after a storm that seemed like it would end the world.

They tilted their heads and said,

“You look different.”

“Are you in love?”

“You’re glowing.”

Yes, I was in love. With myself. With the way sunlight touched my skin like it had missed me.

With the way I had started carrying myself with a kind of grace that shines through.

They told me, “The summer suits you. You look pretty.”

I took that as “This summer, you have found yourself. This summer, you belong. This summer – you are home.”

Because. . .

Pretty is never a look. It is standing without crumbling. It is speaking without trembling. It is breathing without permission.

Pretty was the way my laughter sounded to my own ears. It was the way I chose to offer gentleness to my scars and fears. It was the way summer gave me back the hopes I had abandoned.

Pretty was in my hands—sunburned from too many hours outside, planting, painting, reaching for the sky. It was in my heart—beating, blooming, rebuilding after each bruise, after each goodbye.

That summer, I was embraced by someone who held my sadness like it was something sacred. Someone who felt some coldness still left in the spaces between my ribs, but just offered me more warmth instead.

I let people in. And yes, some stayed, and some didn’t.

I have become the house. The one that doesn’t only shine under the moonlight, the one that stands strong even under the tough sunlight.

The shelter. The light in the window.

The music playing softly in the living room at 2 a.m.

The porch that only waits for me.

That summer let me believe it again.

I am pretty. Warm. Lived-in. Whole.

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