There are certain kinds of quiet that stay with you.
Not the heavy kind that presses in when no one's home. Not the empty kind, either. I mean the sort that follows someone after they've left a space. The kind that clings to objects they touched and air they moved through.
The bookstore had that kind of quiet after she left.
I stayed a few minutes longer than I needed to, pacing the aisles like I'd forgotten something. But I hadn't.
I was just trying to stay inside that quiet a little longer.
•
The morning after, I showed up to the café half an hour early.
It wasn't on purpose. I just couldn't sit still in my apartment. There's a moment, every now and then, where the walls feel too narrow to hold your thoughts. Like they're growing faster than you can catch them.
So I let them follow me into the hum of the espresso machine, the clatter of cups, the faint hiss of steamed milk.
I like the opening shift.
It's just me and the machines, and the soft light slipping through the blinds like it's trying not to wake anything.
I wipe the counter down twice even though it doesn't need it.
Then I take out my notebook and scribble:
There's a kind of intimacy in sharing silence with someone and not needing to fill it.
Some people make you want to talk. Others make you feel heard even when you don't.
I don't write her name.
I haven't asked for it.
But she's started showing up in the margins of things I write. In the space between sentences. The kind of presence that doesn't announce itself but makes everything around it clearer.
•
Around mid-morning, the usuals come in.
An elderly man who only ever orders black coffee but tips like it's a gesture of philosophy. A college girl who brings a different novel every week and takes up the corner booth like it's hers by right. A courier who flirts with the barista I don't like.
The rhythm settles in.
But in the middle of steaming a latte, I glance out the window and wonder, just briefly, what she's doing right now.
Does she write in the mornings?
Does she walk without a destination the way I sometimes do?
Has she read the first page of that book again?
It's ridiculous how many questions live inside one quiet afternoon.
•
Later, on break, I sit on the delivery crates behind the building, half-watching the sky lose its color. It's one of those pale overcast days that blurs the skyline into a painting you can't quite remember.
I check my phone, not expecting anything.
There's no message.
Not that I gave her my number.
Still, the part of me that keeps refreshing her old posts online—the ones she said weren't that popular—hopes for an update. A comment. A line.
Anything.
But there's nothing new.
Just the same words I've already read three times.
If you stand in a hallway long enough, it starts to feel like a room.
That line won't leave me alone.
I wrote something in response to it, privately, last night. Didn't post it. Didn't even save it. Just let it exist in that moment of wanting to say something without expecting anyone to hear it.
•
When I head back in, the café's more crowded. The noise pushes the thoughts out for a while.
But they return later, when I'm home.
It's strange how quiet my place feels now. Like it's waiting for me to realize something.
I make tea I don't drink.
Open a book I don't read.
Sit on the edge of my bed like I'm in the middle of leaving or arriving.
Then I open my laptop and pull up the folder labeled "fragments."
It's where I put things I don't know what to do with.
Ideas. Drafts. One-line poems. Sentences that arrived too early for the story they're meant for.
I add a new entry.
Maybe the most honest parts of us aren't the ones we share. Maybe they're the ones we leave behind, hoping someone else will carry them forward.
I stare at it for a long time.
Then, on impulse, I open the old post again—the one with the hallway.
I leave a comment this time.
Just two words:
Still here.
I don't expect a reply.
But I want her to know.
Even if she's no one.
Even if she's everyone.
•
It's late when I finally sleep.
And in the few minutes before dreams pull me under, I imagine her standing in a bookstore, fingers trailing over spines, looking for something she doesn't know she's about to find.