The Summer That Never Came

In the year 2094, summer became a myth.

People still spoke of it, mostly in past tense. It was in the children's picture books—the golden fields, the blue skies, the laughter that echoed through late evenings. But for eighteen-year-old Aarya, summer had only ever existed in stories told by her grandmother.

“It used to come right after the cherry blossoms,” Daadi would say, staring wistfully at the pale grey clouds that hovered endlessly above their tiny apartment in Sector 12. “And the sun—it was something else. Not like this cold, white glare we get now. It warmed your soul.”

Aarya had never seen sunlight like that. For as long as she could remember, the sky had been washed in dull whites and silvers, rain never really stopping—just pausing occasionally as if to catch its breath.

But something about her grandmother’s words stirred her.

So, the day after her final school exam, Aarya packed a small bag, tucked away her grandmother’s weathered book of old poems, and slipped out of the colony. No one noticed. Most people didn’t look up anymore.

She took the old train route—now mostly abandoned and rusting—and made her way north, following the coordinates in her grandmother’s journal. “Somewhere near the old hill stations,” Daadi had written once, “summer might still be sleeping.”

It sounded foolish. But Aarya had nothing to lose.

Days passed. She walked, hitched rides with silent strangers, stayed in crumbling motels that still smelled of wildflowers and mildew. She listened to old men mutter about "the last real summer” in 2067, just before the Great Tilt.

The world, they said, had shifted on its axis just slightly—enough to throw off the seasons. Governments tried to fix it. Climate machines were built. But they failed. Or perhaps they worked too well. Winter stayed. Summer simply… never returned.

Still, Aarya kept walking.

One morning, somewhere near the edge of the old mountain trails, she saw it.

At first, she thought it was a mirage—some glitch in her vision from walking too long without sleep. But it was real.

A single patch of sunlight streamed through a break in the cloud cover. It kissed the ground like a spotlight from another time. The grass below shimmered—green, not the greyish hue she was used to. The air smelled of warmth. Of mangoes. Of dust after rain.

She dropped to her knees and let the light soak her face.

It was brief. A few minutes, maybe. Then the clouds closed in again.

But it was enough.

When she returned to Sector 12 weeks later, her skin was a little darker, her eyes a little brighter. People whispered. Some asked where she’d gone.

She never told them the exact place. Some things, she believed, needed to be found on your own.

Instead, she planted a tiny sunflower seed in the rooftop garden. Every morning, she sat beside it with her grandmother’s book and read poems about summers long gone. And waited.

Because now she believed: summer hadn't vanished.

It was hiding—waiting for someone to remember it.