Rain again.Always rain when you got nowhere to go.
He pulled the coat tighter — didn't help much. The lining was long gone, smelled of smoke and mold, the ghosts of every couch and alley he'd borrowed. The city light hit the puddles just right, made it look cleaner than it was.
He stopped at the diner window. Warm light inside. A hum that sounded like safety.
People in there always looked the same — dry, fed, soft around the eyes. He could smell the grease and the beer every time someone opened the door.
He watched a man at the bar, mid-forties maybe. Shirt too nice for this side of town. The kind who probably had a house, a shower that worked, a name on a bill somewhere. The man wasn't talking to anyone. Just sitting there, beer sweating in front of him, watching nothing.
For a second, the homeless man — Eli, that's what they used to call him — tried to remember the taste of a burger straight off a plate, not from the trash behind the place. The memory came fuzzy, like a dream you wake from too late.
He caught his own reflection in the glass — hair gone wild, beard matted. Looked older than he felt, younger than he deserved.
Then the man at the bar looked up. Met his eyes.
Just a moment, no more.But it was enough to freeze him.
There was no pity there, no disgust. Just a kind of tired curiosity — the same look a man gives a mirror when he's not sure who's looking back.
Eli wanted to laugh. Or knock on the glass. Or tell him it wasn't that far a fall. That some days, it's just one bad hour, one wrong turn, one silence too long.
But he didn't.You don't break that kind of glass.
He shifted the bag on his shoulder — one pair of socks, a photo, a lighter that didn't work. His feet hurt. His stomach twisted, not from hunger, from memory.
Inside, the man's food came. Big burger, fries stacked like gold. Eli could almost taste the salt, feel the burn of ketchup on his tongue.
He turned away. The rain hit harder now, cold and clean, cutting through the streetlight haze.
He crossed against the light, shoes leaking, traffic hissing like the world whispering, keep moving.
No one watched him go.Or maybe someone did.
Didn't matter.
There was a bridge not far — dry enough underneath to pass the night if the cops didn't care. He thought of the man in the diner, the one with the beer and the stare.
Eli wondered which one of them was really outside.