I sit at The Midnight Café,
the little round table by the window
she once described in a short story.
Outside, the trees sway in the wind,
their green disguising
the crooked tangle of electrical poles.
She called them facades.
Beauty stretched thin over brutality,
birds choosing wires
over branches.
I smile,
and open the notebook
where I’ve copied fragments of her writings.
Lines I underlined.
Sentences that moved me.
Each time I visit the scenes from her stories,
I feel her nearer.
As if at any moment
she’ll step through the door,
sit across from me,
and say hello.
But I would not recognize her.
I don’t know her face.
I never knew her name.
—
Every week her stories arrive,
unsigned,
unclaimed,
like confessions she couldn’t swallow,
exhaled into the void,
and the void turned them into beauty.
My job was to edit them.
Nothing more.
That was our deal.
No names.
No voices.
No meetings.
No “I,” no “you,” no “we.”
Only what was written.
At first, it was an assignment.
Clean, anonymous, safe.
There was something sacred in the not-knowing,
as if distance kept the words unspoiled.
She wrote about masks.
How the world insists on contradictions:
be soft but strong,
beautiful but harmless,
clever but never threatening.
It was raw,
reckless,
a wound left open on the page.
And as I read,
I saw myself
because she named the prison I’ve lived in too.
I am supposed to be “the man”:
The one who never hesitates.
The one who makes the room feel safe.
Rational, strong, confident.
But I am not.
I walk through each day as if the floor might give way,
as if everything is collapsing
and I’m the last one left holding up the roof.
Maybe that’s why I stopped writing
and started editing instead.
Because editing lets me disappear.
It’s safer to move words around
than to admit the weight of my own.
But when I read her, the truth cuts through:
she risks everything in a line,
and I hide behind commas.
Her stories affected me
because she dares what I never do:
to say it out loud.
And for the first time,
I felt less alone in the lie.
—
After a year,
her submissions became my calendar.
Each week split in two:
the waiting,
and the after.
I used to read them like work,
but somewhere along the way,
her voice stopped leaving me.
Even in silence
I can feel her presence,
her pauses in my breath,
her thoughts echoing in my chest.
Her words slipped into my blood,
moved through me
as if they had always belonged there.
—
She quoted a line,
“Turns out that lonely people are all the same.”
I knew it.
It was from Happy Together.
I watched the film again.
And when the line came,
I saw her:
the blue light of the screen across her face,
her body heavy against the bed,
tears she didn’t bother to hide
because no one was there to see.
I wasn’t there.
But I carry that image of her
as if it were memory,
not invention.
Her tales were no longer words.
They were places she had already lived,
scenes she had already endured.
And I walked into them
like a trespasser.
—
Over time, her writing has begun to change.
They no longer read like stories,
but like letters she refuses to sign.
Not addressed to anyone,
but I feel them arrive
with my name hidden between the lines.
She begins to echo me,
folding fragments of my notes
into her verses.
She embraced my feelings,
and returned them as her opening line.
Hesitations she’d sensed in me
became pauses in her stanza.
It was as if she had written us into the margins,
and between those paragraphs
was the only place we were real.
The thread between us tightens.
Her silence bends toward mine,
her ache mirrors back.
For the first time,
I wanted her to know:
that I was here,
that I saw her the way she saw me.
It felt like we were writing each other in secret…
our words no longer separate
but a single fragile strand,
ready to snap if either of us ever named it aloud.
And yet,
I felt the urge to pull harder.
—
Her stories became maps,
and I followed them like a pilgrim.
A café.
A film.
A corner of the city no one notices
until she names it.
I visited them all.
But I wasn’t trying to find her.
I went to feel what she felt…
to sit in her light,
to let her weather move through me.
Sometimes I thought about the men in her writings.
The ones who touched her,
and then left.
I envied them.
Not because they understood her…
they didn’t.
But because for one night,
their hands were on her skin,
her breath belonged to them.
They were written into her body.
While I was trapped in her margins.
The thought shamed me.
Made me sick.
What I felt for her
was the purest thing I’d ever known.
Untouched by lust,
unclouded by wanting.
Love in its truest form.
But if that was enough,
why do I still ache for more?
—
One night,
a story arrived at midnight.
It was rare for her to write of love.
This one circled it,
as if the word itself burned.
She wrote of longing,
of timing,
of hunger pressed against the glass.
I read it again and again.
Her silence was heavier this time,
as if she confessed her love
in the pauses between her lines.
Joy broke over me.
I wanted to hold her.
To find the body behind the words,
the voice behind the silence.
But our deal echoed in my head.
No names.
No voices.
No meetings.
No “I,” no “you,” no “we.”
Only what was written.
I stared at the margin.
I wanted to tell her I had fallen for her too.
That I wanted to see her,
touch her,
love her the way she deserved.
So, I broke the rule…
not with a confession,
but an invitation.
I wrote:
Midnight Café.
Next Tuesday.
7 p.m.
And then I sent it.
—
For the rest of the week,
I throbbed with dread.
Had I ruined everything?
Some things are too late to be undone.
I waited.
For something.
Anything.
A few nights later,
a poem arrived.
Broken in rhythm,
not like the others.
It was titled:
The Things We Never Touched.
Only six lines.
I read them until the words blurred.
It wasn’t a love poem.
Not exactly.
It wasn’t a refusal either.
Not outright.
It circled beauty,
how it withers once handled.
It circled intimacy,
but only at a distance.
It circled love,
but never let the word land.
Every line reached for something
just out of touch.
I couldn’t tell if she was keeping me close,
or pushing me away.
But whatever it was,
deep down I knew
it was over.
—
Her submissions thinned.
Once every two weeks.
Then less.
The stories grew distant,
retreating to her old themes:
loneliness,
shame,
the long work of finding herself.
I combed through every line,
every pause,
every mark of punctuation,
but I wasn’t in them anymore.
I still edited them carefully.
Still left my notes.
It was still my job.
But I stopped leaving pieces of me behind.
And then one day,
they stopped arriving.
And I stopped waiting.
Maybe she found someone else to read her.
Maybe not.
I’ll never know.
—
I sit at The Midnight Café,
the little round table by the window
she once described in a short story.
Outside, the trees sway in the wind,
their green disguising
the crooked tangle of electrical poles.
A woman sat at the next table,
in a loose dress,
the light falling across her face
just as I once imagined.
She scribbled, crossed it out,
then watched the birds on the wires,
as if waiting to write again.
She looked up.
Our eyes met.
And it lingered.
Then she smiled.
And I smiled.
I don’t know if it was her,
or just a stranger.
But for a moment it was both.
The years we never touched.
The life we never had.
All of it alive.
All of it too late.
I closed my notebook,
pages heavy with what I’d carried from her.
I pressed my palm on the cover
as if it still held her warmth.
I stood,
and left the notebook on the table
beside the coffee gone cold,
as if leaving it behind
was the only ending left to us.
And I walked away.
I have not returned since.
Featured image adapted from a photo by Alex Gruber.
See more on Unsplash: @alex_gruber.
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