Some people come into your life like comets. Not to stay. But to scorch a trail so bright across your sky you never forget how it felt to burn.There was a man once. Jem, I called him. Blue-jeaned, guitar-backed, fiercely American --- all tumbleweed heart and raw-knuckled poetry. He wasn't the kind of man you marry. He was the kind of man who wakes you up.He used to call me kid. I was fifteen years younger, still half-molted from my girlhood, trying on womanhood like a borrowed coat. But he never mocked it. He saw the child in me — not as weakness, but as wildness. Wonder. The part of me still unafraid to leap without knowing where I'd land.Jem was fire. Not the kind that warms a hearth. The kind that rages across dry plains. Beautiful. Uncontainable. Necessary.Bipolar, brilliant, broken. His honesty cut like flint --- not cruel, but elemental. He spoke in riddles and revelations. His truths didn't land like petals. They landed like stones skipping across a riverbed --- hard, skipping light, sinking deep.I met him at a time when my soul was molting. I didn't know who I was, only who I was no longer. And Jem, in all his unanchored chaos, didn't try to fix me. He didn't ask me to mother him, or worship him, or tame him. He simply saw me. Me --- with the weight and the weeping and the weary miracles of motherhood. Me, with the poems I hadn't yet written.He didn't run from my Starchild either. That alone made me ache.It became the three of us. Two castaways and a deer-eyed boy who could see the language of light in the spaces between things. We had nothing --- and everything. Laughter, mismatched socks, worn-out floorboards, and a trampoline. That trampoline became a small cosmos.A memory now altar-shaped.I see us --- Jem with his long limbs and wolfish grin, bouncing so high the whole sky cracked open. My son curled like a comet, squealing. Me, caught in midair --- laughing so hard I dissolved into light. "Fly, kid," he shouted, as I rose like a startled bird. And I did. For a moment, I wasn't the mother, the caretaker, the steady one. I was just the kid again — his kid — airborne and untethered. It was joy that pulled me back into my body after years of living only from the neck up. For a moment, I wasn't surviving. I was dancing with gravity.We were a constellation for a little while. A small, defiant galaxy. Orbiting outside the known maps.He was always running. Born in Sacramento. German-Irish blood, salesman's son. Jem had once tried to play the role. Suburbs. Marriage. A woman named Diane who made pasta on Wednesdays. But it itched. The safety. The scripted days. The slow erosion of wonder. He said New York called to him like prophecy. Wild and shining and full of ghosts. And so he left. Left his wife. Left the cul-de-sac. Left the American Dream like a coat on a hook. He was never meant for stillness.But then came the Devon month.He had taken a job at an Arabian horse farm, needing space, money, rhythm. And I — I stayed behind with the boy, hollowed and howling.We spoke every day. My phone became a lifeline. His voice, that impossible drawl of thunder and tenderness, was the only thing keeping my lungs moving. When he called, the world resumed. When he didn't, it blurred.Then one night, I couldn't wait anymore. I took the keys, silent and certain, and drove into the liquid black. The satnav fixed to Devon. My gaze fixed to him.The motorway was lonely, a river of wet asphalt and supply lorries slicing through the dark. I drove through the witching hours, through the velvet stretch of England's sleeping belly. Past hilltop roads that narrowed to breathless ribbons, the trees leaning in like ancient witnesses.Dawn broke over Devon like a benediction. And there he stood.Tall, blue-jeaned, the blue fire back in his eyes. Framed against a long gravel driveway, black Arabian horses galloping behind him — manes flying like flags in the wind.He once told me his mother's people were Irish horse thieves — wild-blooded men who ran under moonlight, stealing what couldn't be tamed. I thought of that, watching him there. A man born of bandits, now tending royal horses. Like all things in his life, it was poetry and paradox.His asymmetrical smile — crooked, boyish, half-grief, half-gold.He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. We stood there, suspended in that moment where ache becomes reunion, and time dares not interrupt.We didn't drive home. We stayed.Lyme Regis. Wild. Romantic. Almost mythic. Waves crashing on the harbor walls like they were trying to remember something. We wrote our names in the wet sand, and the sea — like time always does — wiped them away. We ate ice cream. Walked past a small bookstore where, in the window, a sign stared back at us in German:Nur für Verrückte. For madmen only.It felt like a message just for us. A secret only wild ones receive. I looked at him and smiled. "You knew I was mad when you met me," I said. He grinned, wolfish. "Exactly why I stayed."That weekend felt like a portal. A dream threaded into waking. The kind of interlude life grants only once — if you're lucky. We didn't know it then, but we were saying goodbye to the peak of our flame. The gods always ask for repayment.But fire resists domestication.Jem began to flicker. The blue in his eyes turned storm-grey. The guitar fell silent. Some nights he paced like a feral thing. Other nights, he vanished.I learned the weather patterns of his mind. Manic winds. Quiet thunder. The silence, always, was the most dangerous.He tried to stay. God, he did. But some men are born with the road in their bones.There was a part of him always walking --- from pain, from love, from stillness.And I, already stretched thin across motherhood and meaning, could not be the map and the anchor and the destination.So we parted.Gently. With tears. With hands that lingered too long at the doorway.He left the cottage. Left the country. Left me.But he never left the story.He became myth.The American ghost in my chapters. The blue fire in my blood. The voice I hear still, on days I unravel --- "You're not crazy. You're awake."Sometimes, I still hear it — the rasp of his voice, low and amused: "You'll be alright, kid. You always were." And just like that, I'm seventeen again — barefoot, burning, unafraid of the edge.He saw the artist in me before I did. Told me I was sacred. Wild. A woman worth building a world with.And when he couldn't build it, he handed me the map. Back to myself.I kept in touch, loosely. A voice note. A photo. A sudden song at midnight.One time, I sent him a picture of the boy with the deer-eyes. He replied: "He still looks like a star. You both do."And I wept. Because some people don't stay. But they light you up. And you never stop glowing.This chapter is his.The man with no axis and no anchor. The man who flung us into a new galaxy and stitched laughter into our ribs.He was never meant to stay.But he was a damn beautiful beginning.