There are nights I wake up at 3:17 a.m., with the quiet certainty that somewhere, in some version of the world, you are still sitting at that old cafe window, waiting. The one with the chipped teacups and the jazz records that never quite matched the mood. In that version, I go to you. I say something—anything— even if it's clumsy. Even if it shatters the delicate silence between us. But that version isn't this one. And I never went. Instead, I sat in the warmth of your presence, day after day, year after year, as if I had all the time in the world to not speak. You laughed once, head tilted back like the sky might catch your joy. I remember thinking how unfair it was that someone could carry entire galaxies in a smile and never know it. I could’ve told you. I should’ve told you. But I didn’t. I let the days pass, each one a coin dropped in a fountain of unspoken things. And now, you’ve gone— moved cities, found someone else, or maybe just drifted into a version of yourself that doesn’t remember me. I still carry you, folded carefully between the pages of every book I’ve tried to finish since. Like a sentence that never quite reached its ending. Sometimes, I imagine seeing you again. Not to win you back. Not to rewrite anything. Just to say: “I knew. I always knew. I just… didn’t know how to be brave.” But that, too, stays imagined. And so I go on— a little quieter, a little older, haunted not by what happened, but by everything that never did.