I had lived a thousand evenings alone.The city had long forgotten my footsteps, yet I continued to walk its narrow veins like a ghost. Every night the streets whispered. Soft and hollow, as if carrying confessions of others who, like me, had no one to confess to. The lamplights burned like tired souls, flickering but never dying, illuminating the quiet pavements where even shadows feared to linger too long. My own shadow, however, had stayed loyal. It followed me home every night, obedient, silent and the only witness to my existence.
There is a kind of madness in loneliness. At first, it gnaws gently at the corners of your mind. Then, slowly, it begins to live there. I used to imagine I was immune to it. I told myself solitude was a choice, that I loved it. But love, I have come to understand, is just the name we give to what we cannot escape.
It was one of those evenings. Late, cold, mist curling like smoke around the lampposts, that's when I first saw her.
I was walking home from a café I often visited but never entered for company. The same table by the window, the same bitter coffee gone cold before I finished it. A book open before me, unread. People around me laughing, enjoying, existing. I envied their trivial lives. I too, wanted to laugh without feeling the echo of my own hollowness. But even laughter seemed dishonest to me now.
Outside, the city was beginning to shiver. The rain had stopped an hour ago, leaving the streets slick with reflection. I remember the smell of wet stone, the sound of a distant violin somewhere across the street. Someone was practicing, clumsy yet sincere. It was then, amid that imperfect music and the dim light, that I saw her.
She stood at the corner near the bookshop. The one that was always empty yet never out of business, as though it survived merely on memory now. She was waiting for something or someone, her hands folded together, her eyes fixed on the ground. The air around her seemed lighter, almost trembling. There was nothing miraculous about her presence. She wasn't radiant nor divine. But there was a strangeness in the way the light fell on her. Subtle, intriguing and unintentional, that made her seem less like a person and more like a question.
It was not the beauty that struck me, but familiarity. As if I had been waiting for her all along without knowing it. Something in her face, the curve of her mouth or perhaps the sorrow that clung to her posture, echoed a fragment of myself. I could not tell if she was real or a hallucination born from too many sleepless nights. But in that moment, I felt an ache in my heart, something which I haven't' felt before. Sudden and terrifying, like a wound reopened without warning.
I did not move. I only stared at her.Perhaps that is when obsession begins. Not in grand declarations, but in silent moments where the soul forgets to breathe.
She looked up briefly, and our eyes met. It was no longer than a heartbeat, but in that fraction of eternity, I felt seen for the first time in my life. Not understood, not known, just simply seen. Her gaze was soft, almost apologetic, as though she had caught me naked in my own thoughts. I turned away first, pretending to study a passing carriage, though my entire being trembled like a candle flickering in a room devoid of light.
I remember thinking absurd things. The color of her coat (grey, worn but elegant), the faint line of exhaustion near her temple, the way her breath fogged the cold air. I noticed everything, as if by remembering her details I could trap her within me forever. The mind of a lonely man is a dangerous place. It builds altars out of glances, like a cathedral of longing lit by the flicker of what could've been.
I followed her. Not out of intent, but instinct. She began walking slowly down the narrow street that led toward the river, and my feet betrayed me. Each step I took felt like I was trespassing, yet I could not stop. The city too seemed complicit. The stones quieter, the air denser, as if urging me forward. She did not notice me, or perhaps she did and chose mercy over confrontation.
She stopped near a bridge, the kind that divided the city into two unequal halves. One for the living, the other for the dreamers. I kept my distance, half hidden behind a streetlamp. She leaned against the railing and looked out over the water. Her eyes looking at something afar, yet to be seen. The reflection of the lamps danced on the river's surface breaking with each ripple. There was something unbearably fragile about her loneliness. I could see it even from afar. The stillness of her body, the quiet surrender of her shoulders. She was not waiting for anyone. She was simply there, as I had been, a part of the night's melancholy composition.
And then, without turning, she spoke."You can come closer," she said. Her voice was low, almost uncertain as if afraid it might dissolve into the mist before it reaches me.
I froze. She had known. Known I was there. Known I'd been watching her from the shadows. She didn't turn. Didn't look. But something in her stillness felt deliberate, like she was giving me a choice. To step forward. To break the silence. To risk being seen.
I approached her slowly, each step echoing too loudly in my ears. "I—I didn't mean to follow," I stammered, though the lie was so transparent it almost mocked me. The night held its breath. And so did I, waiting for what was to come.
She smiled faintly, still looking at the river. "No one ever means to," she said. "Yet we all do."
I didn't know what she meant, and I didn't ask. I stood beside her, the silence between us heavy yet alive. I wanted to say something, anything, but words failed me. All the things I had ever wanted to express seemed small, meaningless, compared to the trembling truth that I was standing next to her.
Finally, she turned to face me. Her eyes grey, perhaps blue, I could not tell. They were tired but kind. "You look like someone who's been searching for too long," she said.
I let out a hollow laugh. "Or someone who stopped searching a long time ago."
"Which is worse?" she asked.
"The latter," I whispered.
She studied me for a moment, then looked away again. "Then it's good you walked tonight."
We talked briefly.
She said she worked at the library overlooking the square. Her voice was quiet, like she wasn't used to speaking to strangers. When I asked her name, she hesitated, then shrugged.
"It doesn't matter," she said.
I told her mine anyway. It felt strange coming out of my mouth, like I was borrowing someone else's identity for the moment. She didn't react. Just nodded, eyes drifting toward the mist that curled around the lampposts. The conversation was simple. But beneath it, something stirred. Something raw and unspoken. It didn't feel like meeting someone new. It felt like waking up inside a dream I'd once had and never finished.
After a while, she said she must go. I wanted to ask when I could see her again, but something held me back. Perhaps fear, perhaps reverence. She smiled once more, that same delicate smile that seemed to contain the whole sorrow of the world, and walked away, her figure dissolving into the fog.
I stood there long after she was gone. The night had grown colder, but I felt strangely alive. My heart, which had for years been nothing but a dull machine of habit, now beat violently, like an animal remembering its freedom. The city seemed to change around me. The same streets now glimmered with meaning, the same wind carried her absence. I had not fallen in love. I had fallen into a kind of fever.
In the days that followed, I returned to the same places. The café, the bridge, the library square—under the pretense of routine, but truly in search of her. Each evening, I told myself I would not look, and each evening I did. Her absence became a second shadow, walking beside the first. I began to wonder whether she was real at all, or some cruel invention of my mind to save me from despair. But even if she was an illusion, she was the most beautiful lie I had ever believed in.
It terrified me.How could someone I barely met unravel me so entirely?
There are moments that divide a man's life into before and after. That evening was mine.Before her, I existed like a shadow in an empty corridor. After her, I began to feel again. Painfully, violently, beautifully. I did not yet understand that love, like madness, begins not with joy but with recognition. You look at another being and realize, with both terror and relief, that your solitude has found its twin.
That night, as I walked home under the dim yellow lights, I caught my reflection in a puddle. My eyes looked strange, feverish, alive. I smiled for the first time in years. The rain began to fall again, slow and soft, blurring everything, the streets, the lamps, even my own face. But I didn't mind. Somewhere in that infinite greyness, she existed. And that was enough.
I went to bed with her voice still echoing in my mind: You look like someone who's been searching for too long.And in the darkness, I whispered to no one,"I found you too late."
But perhaps love is always found too late.