Fireworks

The world faded away, and I dreamed of August 2, 1992. On the last evening of a summer trip to Montreal, I shared a dance with the love of my dreams on the deck of a St. Lawrence River dinner cruise. I was seventeen, and she looked around my age. When the last slow song played — “Nothing Broken But My Heart” by Celine Dion — the wind blew past me, and through her shoulder-length hair. The blue of her cocktail dress, pale as white in the waxing twilight, made her my Cinderella. I took a breathless step, and another. Face to face, I saw her eyes — they were hazel, the eyes of the beautiful stranger.