The Trouble with Your Squint by Robert A. Cozzi

Before our FaceTime call today, I told myself not to melt if you start squinting at me. It sounds ridiculous when I say it like that, but you and I both know there are certain expressions that affect people more than declarations ever could. Yours has always been that small squint, like you are trying to bring someone into focus without realizing you have already drawn them in.

Today isn’t supposed to be anything like before. It is just two old almost-lovers catching up after too much time has passed, two people who somehow managed to remain friends after four months of intimacy born out of the same wreckage. I hesitate to call what we had dating. I hesitate even more to call it a rebound because that feels disrespectful to the depth of it. But the truth is we came together at precisely the moment our prospective boyfriends walked away from us. Same week. Same bruised timing. Two abandoned satellites suddenly caught in the same orbit.

And maybe that is why my mind keeps drifting back to the night we found ourselves in that crowded room, listening to a Coldplay cover band play. You were standing near the bar when I spotted you.

(No. That is not quite right.)

 Spotting you suggests something casual, an accident of sight. What I actually remember is the sudden, blinding flash of it, like looking straight into a raw light bulb, the kind that leaves an unshakeable glow behind your eyelids when you close them.

You were laughing at something someone said, your head tipped back slightly, one hand wrapped around your drink. For a heartbeat, the noise of the room completely narrowed until there was only you left inside it. When your eyes finally found mine, you cut through the static of the crowd toward me like certainty wearing a leather jacket.

“Wow,” you said, walking over like you already knew where you were going. “You look like you just got your heart broken in high definition.”

“Thanks,” I said. “You look like trouble.”

You grinned like that was a compliment.

Then you tipped three orange Tic Tacs into my palm and popped one onto your own tongue. I remember staring down at them in my hand. They were bright, absurd, impossible little things against our shared wreckage. For a split second, as you moved, I thought I could see that tiny piece of candy resting on your tongue like a small, glowing signal in the dim light of the bar.

And I remember, very clearly, thinking: I want to kiss you.

We didn’t. Not then.

Instead, we danced, laughed, and made plans to see each other again. But one thing became painfully clear before the night ended: together we could ignite the sun and strike loneliness with its warmth. Afterward, we walked down West 20th Street while you talked endlessly about music, childhood, and how breakups made you want to drive until the city completely disappeared behind you.

I barely spoke. Mostly I just watched your hands moving through the air like pale winged doves trying to outrun gravity. Then you grabbed my hand and started running.

“Where are we going?” I laughed.

“You will see.”

We stopped under Saint Peter’s church just as the bells hit midnight. You stood there breathing hard, smiling like a man who had successfully stolen fire from the gods. And I remember thinking: one night with you is not going to fix my broken heart. But maybe you have given it a jumpstart. After that, everything accelerated.

You had a habit of hugging people like you were not afraid of closeness. Like it was nothing. Like it was normal. Every time you hugged me, there was a small sound you made. It was barely audible, just a soft exhale, like relief slipping out of you before you could stop it. It sounded like contentment, if contentment had a voice. I never told you I noticed. But I did. I noticed everything, especially when it came to you.

The first summer rain we shared arrived without warning. People ran for awnings and subway entrances, but you tilted your face toward the sky like the storm had personally invited you. The rain soaked us within minutes. Your T-shirt clung to you, water streaming down your jawline. You laughed so loudly people turned to stare.

“Come on,” I yelled. “We are drenched!”

“That is the point!” you shouted back.

Later, standing in my apartment bathroom wrapped in the oversized JMU sweatshirt I lent you, sweatpants cinched absurdly tight so they would not fall off your hips, you looked into the fogged mirror and laughed at your own reflection. You looked beautiful, ridiculously, dangerously beautiful. And frighteningly tangible. That is the problem with you in memory. You remain tactile.

I can still feel the evening heat shining through your skin. I can still see your sculpted arms resting across my sheets at three in the morning. I can still remember the dim lights of the F train deepening your eyes into something like blue saltwater beneath rain clouds.

You were a musician, which meant nights with you became masterclasses in obsession. We would stay up until dawn listening to albums, discussing them like we were defending doctoral theses. Melody. Musicality. Lyrical architecture. We mapped out which songs reopened old wounds, and which songs felt like survival.

I loved your intensity. I loved those long pianist fingers of yours gliding across keys one night and across my skin the next.

The dangerous thing was how easy we became. We were just two people healing by indulging each other’s loneliness, two trapped lovers quietly mistaking the other for the sun.

The beach house was probably the happiest stretch of it all. It was two stolen weeks away from work, obligation, and reality, swimming every day until our skin smelled like salt and sun. We would read in a silence that never felt empty. We would cook dinners barefoot in the tiny kitchen while music played softly from your speakers.

For a little while, we lived inside something that resembled a shared life.

Temporary, yes. But it was undeniably a life.

And then there was the dock. It was the night everything slowed down in a way I still cannot fully explain. We carried large pieces of watermelon down to the water’s edge like it was nothing important, like we were not about to become completely different versions of ourselves in the middle of it.

The boat tied to the dock rocked gently beside us, the rope creaking softly with the tide. Crickets filled the air like a living song. We sat there with our feet hanging over the edge, swinging just above the dark water.

You bit into the watermelon first, spitting seeds into the night one after another like tiny comets disappearing into black glass. Then you turned your head and flicked one at me. It hit my forehead and bounced onto the wood. I laughed before I even had time to be offended. Then you drew a finger down my cheek, leaving a trail of dripping juice.

“You are unbelievable,” I said.

You just kept eating, unbothered, and then deliberately bit into another piece so the juice would drip to your chin. It caught the moonlight. Suddenly, I felt a flush of ardor at the sight of you and your chin. I do not even remember deciding. I just reached over, grabbed the back of your head, and kissed you.

It was a long, passionate, unthinking kiss. It was certain in a way nothing else in my life was at that time.

When I pulled back, you looked at me like you were surprised and not surprised at the same time. Breathless even. Then you smiled.

“Wow,” you whispered.

I nudged your knee with mine. “I am not the only one who can be spontaneous, you know.”

Ever since then, I swear, you have always reminded me of watermelon in summer eaten all the way down to the rind. Sweetness, heat, and something that does not know how to last past its own season.

Then there was that impossibly hot night. No wind. No relief. Just summer heat and humidity flexing its muscles.

“Come on,” you said suddenly. “I ve got an idea.”

The saltwater pool sat across the boardwalk from the ocean, closed for the night behind its useless little fence. I grew up there. I knew every inch of it. As kids, my friends and I used to run between the ocean and that pool until sunset.

We hopped the fence. We stripped down. The water welcomed us like forgiveness, offering cool salt against overheated skin. We splashed each other mercilessly until exhaustion softened us, and eventually, we floated side-by-side beneath the enormous summer sky. That was one of my favorite things about you. It was your childlike joy. Around you, I rediscovered my own.

Then you leaned toward me. The kiss was immediate and fierce, but different from the one we shared on the dock. This one was less careful. I do not know how long we stayed locked inside it. We stayed long enough to forget consequences, but short enough to be interrupted by a flashlight beam and a voice yelling from somewhere beyond the water.

“HEY!” the security guard shouted.

We climbed out of the pool and ran. Shorts half-on. Clothes bundled under our arms. You scaled the fence first, then turned back and grabbed my forearm just as the guard inched toward us.

“Faster!” you yelled, laughing.

We ran barefoot down the street, our feet slapping the warm pavement. We were not scared. We knew we could outrun him. A block later, we doubled over laughing so hard we could barely breathe. I cannot remember another moment from that period of my life when I felt so completely carefree. That is what you gave me. And the way we were together, spontaneous, indulgent, alive, was exactly what I needed after heartbreak. It was exactly what you needed too.

But somewhere beneath all the joy, I knew. I knew by our last night at the beach house. You sat beside the big open window smoking quietly into the darkness, blowing smoke through the screen while ashes drifted downward like tiny flakes of gray snow. Your head found my shoulder automatically, like it belonged there. I remember looking out at the night sky and understanding with unbearable clarity that this was the last time. The last cigarette smoke through the screen. The last shoulder lean. The last shared night sky.

We had mistaken timing for destiny. Any chance at permanence had already disappeared beyond the city limits.

And yet, here we are. Years later. Still in each other’s lives somehow. Still connected by some different, gentler thread neither of us completely severed. And I have never stopped writing about you. Not really. Not in any straight line I could point to and say this is about you. But in pieces. In rain scenes, in hands, in music. In the silence between sentences. In the taste of summer watermelon. In characters who do not know how to stay.

My phone rings. Your face appears on the screen. You smile immediately. And then, damn you, you start squinting at me.

That familiar little squint, like you are trying to see beneath my face to read something I forgot to say out loud.

I swear softly under my breath.

You laugh. “What?” you ask.

“You still do that,” I say.

“Do what?” you ask.

I shake my head. “Nothing.”

Just everything, I think.

Robert A. Cozzi is a New Jersey native whose creative nonfiction is rooted in a lifelong daily journaling practice that explores memory, connection, and the enduring nature of love and friendship. His work has appeared in publications such as "Bending Genres," "Remington Review," "Reverie," "Ink Sweat & Tears," and "Cosmic Daffodil." Cozzi's debut novel, "Fate Has Handed Me a Wildcard," is scheduled for release by 21 Chieftans Press in 2026.