Five years used to seem like a long time.
Now twenty seems short. No, her hair doesn't show gray like my black shows lightning zigzags. But I've stopped being older and wiser, and she's stopped leaving me behind.
Thankfully, pilgrims don't often visit Besaid anymore to view the High Summoner and her ex-Guardian like ghosts on the Farplane. For the first few years, it seemed as if Yuna would never be granted the Calm she'd earned, but she has it now. She mentors the children that mainlanders send to our little temple school. I teach them geography and history, and she teaches them how to think and question and believe. In the monsoon season, we visit Rikku and Wakka and their unruly brood.
The ocean behind our house has become a source of joy instead of sorrow.
Yuna still goes down to our private dock every day, but I think she's finally forgotten why. She whistles to the gulls. They answer. She dances, but not for the dead. We've both left ghosts behind.
I wish she could still walk on water. I wish the waves would bear her aloft on a lily of living surf. But it's so much better without pyreflies. The water on her cheeks is only spray, not tears. Her smile is real.
Yuna doesn't dance alone now. Her hands are laced with mine. Her left eye is the ocean's green, her right reflects the sky. Mine mirror the sunset. And when she catches me off-guard and whirls me into her spiral dance, lifting me off my feet and teasing me for nursing my scrolls all day like a nesting chocobo, it feels to me as if she still can walk on water, after all.