The snow did not sleep that night. It drifted endlessly, as if the sky had forgotten how to do anything else.
It whispered against Elirys's window, tapping gently like it was asking to be let in. The city below was blurred in white, soft and soundless, its sharpness buried beneath frost and hush. Yet her fingers clutched something delicate, something real, a folded note, and within it, a single dried flower.
The words still echoed in her head.
You are not as invisible as you think.
She read it again, slower this time, hoping the meaning might unfold differently. But it didn't. It was simple. It was kind. And somehow, it felt like it was meant only for her, even though he hadn't asked her name, and she hadn't asked his.
She sat beside the candlelight in her apartment, the wax puddling beneath its slow, silent burn. Shadows played against the walls like distant memories. She didn't know whether to smile or cry.
Instead, She tucked the flower between the pages of a book she always carried - a journal filled with unfinished letters she'd never send. Maybe one day, she'd write about him. Maybe she already had.
Back in her apartment, everything was quiet. Her little sanctuary. A single candle flickered beside her window, the wax dripping like a silent clock. The city lights outside blurred behind frost-kissed glass.
She sat by the candlelight, knees drawn up, and opened her journal. For the first time in weeks, she didn't know what to write. So she drew instead - A boy in a dark coat beneath a broken streetlamp.
She drew the soft slope of his shoulders, the curve of his mouth even though she hadn't really seen it. She shaded the shadows like they mattered. And beside him, a bench. A girl. The snowfall between them.
And then, at the corner of the page, she drew the flower.
She drew it last, with such gentleness it almost hurt.
Beneath the sketch, she wrote:
"What if love isn't a promise, or a fire, or a storm?What if it's just… someone who stays in the silence?"
She leaned back in her chair, the ink still drying. The room smelled faintly of candlewax and snowfall and something unnamed, something she hadn't felt in a long time - possibility.
The flower from the note, pale and papery, was tucked into the book like a bookmark between two versions of herself. The one before the bench, and the one after.
She closed the book gently. Her eyes wandered to the note again. Still there. Still real.
There was something in her chest. Not warmth. Not quite yet. But maybe… a thawing.
And in the quiet of her room, as the wind sang to the windowpanes, where even her heartbeat sounded like snowfall, Elirys whispered to no one:
"Please... let it be real this time."