Elirys woke up to a quiet, grey morning.
She didn't remember when sleep had taken her. The note, the flower- were still pressed between her fingers like a half-forgotten prayer. Light spilled faintly through the window, not quite warm, not quite cold. Everything in between.
She sat up slowly, the world around her muffled as if wrapped in cotton. The air held the weight of something unsaid.
Unfolding the note once more, she traced the faded words with her thumb.
"You are not as invisible as you think."
She read it once. Twice. Ten times. Each time, it echoed differently. It read like truth. Or maybe it was a lie spoken gently enough to sound like kindness. Either way, it haunted her.
She pressed the white flower gently between the pages of an old book on her shelf. A collection of poems no one else had read. It felt right, this secret belonging to a secret. She didn't know his name, or why he had spoken to her, but somehow… she wanted to believe it mattered.
Later that day, the snow turned wet and heavy, clinging to rooftops and blurring the sharpness of the city. Elirys pulled on her coat and wandered again, through the same quiet streets, as if retracing her steps might reveal something she missed.
She passed the bus stop, the broken streetlight, the silence. No one waited for her there. No shadows lingered.
No boy beneath the streetlight. No new note. No signs.
Just the sound of dripping icicles and a dove watching her from a rooftop like it knew the ending to a story she hadn't written yet.
Still, she kept walking. Her boots left no sound. Her thoughts were louder than anything.
Maybe I imagined him.Maybe I needed him to exist.Or maybe… I was meant to find that note before I disappeared completely.
She turned away.
But on her walk home, something unexpected stopped her. A small bookstore tucked between a florist and a forgotten tailor's shop, a place she had passed a dozen times and never entered. Today, the door was open.
A bell above the door jingled as she stepped in. The warmth hit her like memory - faint, comforting, faraway.
Dust, old paper, the scent of something ancient and true, a faint trace of old dreams.
The man behind the counter barely looked up, just nodded. She wandered through the shelves until she saw it, a small, clothbound journal on a display marked: For the ones who feel too much.
She opened it. Blank pages. Nothing but space, waiting.
For the first time in a long time, she wanted to fill something.
Elirys paid with a quiet thank you, cradled the journal like a small animal, and stepped back out into the cold.
That night, she opened it again beneath her blankets, moonlight brushing her hands.
The silence of her room seemed to bend around her. She picked up her pen, the ink trembling just slightly.
She didn't write to anyone in particular. Not to the boy. Not even to the idea of love.
She wrote to the ache. To the part of her that still hoped.
Just for herself.
"If someone is out there,reading this, thinking of me - know that I'm trying.I'm still here.And maybe, just maybe,I want to be seen."
The ink bled softly across the page, like snow melting into warmth.
And though her heart still ached, it ached in a way that no longer felt so alone.