Shout out and a big Thank you to DeAndre for sharing this story with us.
Ten Summers Ago
The heat in Raleigh has a way of slowing everything down in July, and DeAndre Bishop had come to love that about it. At thirty-three, he'd learned to read the season like an old friend — the way the cicadas started up around six in the evening, the way the air over Fayetteville Street shimmered just before a thunderstorm rolled in from the west. But this particular Tuesday, standing outside a coffee shop near Moore Square with a cold brew sweating in his hand, his mind wasn't on the present at all. It was ten summers back, to the night he met Nia.
He was twenty-three then, fresh off a shift at the restaurant where he waited tables to get through his last year at N.C. State, still carrying the particular restlessness of a young man who hadn't yet figured out what he wanted from his life.
He said it was a First Friday in downtown Raleigh — the galleries and shops along Hargett and Blount Streets thrown open, music drifting out of doorways, the whole city humming with that loose, unhurried summer energy. He'd gone with a couple of friends, more for the free art, conversations and cold drinks than anything else.
He remembered the exact moment. A pop-up gallery in an old warehouse space, string lights strung across the ceiling, and a young woman standing in front of a painting of the Raleigh skyline, tilting her head like she was trying to solve a puzzle only she could see. She had on a yellow sundress, and when she turned to look at whoever was standing too close to her, it happened to be him.
"You're blocking my light,"
she said, and DeAndre — normally never at a loss for words — had just laughed and stepped aside.
That was Nia. Sharp, funny, unafraid to say exactly what she meant. They ended up talking for two hours that night, wandering from the gallery to a food truck parked near the courthouse, sharing a plate of loaded fries and arguing about whether Raleigh or Durham had better barbecue.
She was visiting from Charlotte, up for the summer interning at a design firm, and she talked about the city like she was already imagining a life in it — the way the trees canopied over the streets in Oakwood, the way summer thunderstorms made the whole place smell like rain on hot concrete.
They spent the rest of that summer finding reasons to be in the same place — free concerts at Red Hat Amphitheater, long walks through the Rose Garden at Lake Wheeler when the light turned gold in the evenings, the two of them talking about nothing and everything until the fireflies came out.
It wasn't a love story, not exactly. Nia went back to Charlotte in August, and life did what life does — new jobs, new cities, new people. They lost touch somewhere around the second year, the way so many summer connections do.
But DeAndre had never forgotten how that summer felt. There was something about being twenty-three in Raleigh, with the whole humid, unhurried season stretched out in front of him, that had shaped the way he saw the city ever since.
Every First Friday, every plate of food truck fries, every thunderstorm that rolled in fast and left the pavement steaming — some part of him was still standing in that warehouse gallery, watching a woman in a yellow dress tell him he was blocking her light.
He didn't know where Nia was now. Charlotte, maybe. Somewhere else entirely. But he liked to think that if she ever came back through Raleigh in July, she'd still recognize it — the cicadas, the string lights, the particular gold of a summer evening settling over the city they'd once shared for a season.
DeAndre finished his coffee, checked his watch, and headed back into the thick of the afternoon heat, the city around him humming just like it always had.
Interested in More Great Stories?
"We'll Always Have Summer" by Jenny Han — part of the Summer I Turned Pretty series.
"The Notebook" by Nicholas Sparks — This classic romance is set in New Bern, North Carolina.
"Beach Haven" by T.I. Lowe (Carolina Coast Collection) — An ex-Marine finds healing (and love) with a free-spirited boutique owner.
About the images: The artwork in this article is AI-generated and is meant to capture the atmosphere and ideas discussed rather than depict the actual setups someone else has created exactly. We intentionally created original AI illustrations for this story.
