Morning arrived without warmth like a gentle reminder that time moves forward, even when the heart longs to stay frozen in a single name.
********************
Morning brought no warmth.
It arrived only as a soft reminder that time moves forward even when the heart longs to remain in one name.
Aerish Elowen sat by her window,still and silent.
Her fingers held a pen,but no words came out.
Rain continued its quiet dance against the glass tiny drops like dreams that refused to fade.
On her wooden desk lay an unsent letter. The ink had long dried.
"Kael… we met yesterday without a word. Was my silence too long,or your memory too far away?"
She read the sentence again,letting it hang in the air like a song only she could hear.
She wanted to write more.
But all that remained was a pause.
A long, aching pause.
Elmsworth's corridors felt emptier than usual,even though they were crowded with students.
Some hurried because of the rain;
others moved slowly like Aerish,who wandered in stillness while her heart stirred with storms.
Kael walked a few steps ahead.
His hair was damp,no umbrella in sight.
Aerish watched the way his shoulders slouched slightly…
the way he paused briefly in front of an old painting on the academy wall.
Liora spoke beside her,rambling about delayed poetry assignments and the stubborn weather.
But her voice sounded distant,like an echo from another world.
Aerish's world was occupied by one presence alone one that never turned around.
"Yesterday,I wanted to say hello.
But my voice only reached the unfinished page of a poem."
Hidden in an old philosophy book,Aerish kept a journal filled with words never sent:
"I saw you today through the library window. Your eyes never met mine, yet I felt as though my name once lived in them."
"I love you like rain loves the rooftop falling again and again,never asking to be loved back."
Each line was born of a wound that didn't bleed. A memory incomplete but persistent.
That evening,The Quill & Rain café smelled of cinnamon and aging paper.
Liora chatted with Eliah near the poetry shelf.
Aerish took her usual seat in the corner by the window.
Eliah approached silently,placing a warm cup of coffee and a folded note on her table.
"Someone left this in the stack of Spanish poetry books.
Thought you might want to read it,"he said gently, then returned to the counter.
Aerish unfolded the paper.
"There was someone I once helped in the rain. I've forgotten their face,but I remember the loneliness.
And somehow, every time it rains…
I feel like I need to find something again."
Her heart quivered.
She knew it wasn't from Kael.
But still it felt like it came from someone who once stood beside her heart.
She folded the paper softly and tucked it into her book.
"Hope is another form of emptiness.
But today… I'll let it stay a little longer."
Night arrived slowly,like the final sentence of a story that didn't want to end.
In her room,Aerish lit a small candle.
Soft golden light danced on the wall, keeping quiet company with her sleepless thoughts.
She opened an old journal.
On page 87, an unfinished poem waited:
"If one day you read this and know that every rain brings your shadow back, please… don't turn around. Let me love you from afar, like a star that never falls to earth."
She tried to write his name:
Kael.
But her pen stopped at the letter K.
"There are names I cannot write in full, for each letter is still a fresh wound."
Somewhere in the academy's back garden, beneath a tree shedding memories with its leaves, Kael stood alone.
He looked up not searching for answers, but because something inside him felt hollow, and he didn't know why.
A whisper drifted through his mind.
Not a voice.
Not words.
Just a feeling that someone once waited.
Aerish,in her room,wrote:
"I once was the voice in your rain, but you never turned around. It's alright. I'm still here, loving you… in words that never arrive."
Outside,the rain continued.
Like a love that chose silence.
Gentle.
Deep.
Endless.
---
That afternoon,she returned to her room.
Under the warm flicker of her desk lamp,she opened a small box made of worn leather.
Inside were fragments of paper,unsealed envelopes,and torn-out pages from journals words never meant for anyone but him.
All addressed to one name.
Kael Renford.
She picked up a small slip of paper, the ink slanted and delicate:
To you,who never knew,
Today I saw you again.
Of course it was raining.
The sky mirrored that painting we once accidentally shared.
You walked by as always.
And I stayed behind the glass,silent,wishing time could pretend we never lost our names.
She folded the note gently and placed it at the bottom of the pile.
Then,with slow,deliberate motion,she began writing on a fresh page.
Black ink glided over paper:
"Have you ever felt like you knew someone just by the silence between you? As if their name left a mark on your chest,even if your lips trembled too much to say it out loud."
That night, Aerish lit a single candle.
Beyond the window, the rain still fell soft and steady.
As if even the sky refused to sleep.
She opened her journal again and wrote:
"Sometimes I want to write a letter that can never be sent.
Not because I don't know where it should go but because I do.
Because I know…
the moment you read it, I'd lose the only place in this world where I could love you without having to explain a thing."
—
Elsewhere in the city, Kael sat in a quiet corner of The Quill & Rain.
A cup of coffee rested beside him, untouched and cooling.
In his hand was an old poetry book he had found that morning in the library.
The center pages were scribbled with someone's handwriting.
Faint ink.
But piercing.
In the corner of one page, a sentence stopped him cold:
"If I am the rain, would you remember the moment you first stopped feeling alone?"
Kael touched the words with the tip of his finger.
His heart stirred strangely.
Unfamiliar.
Like a song from a hallway long forgotten.
He turned to the window.
Rain blurred the world again.
And for a moment,he felt as if someone was calling his name not with sound,but with an unnamed memory.
Night deepened,and Edinburgh slowly sank into its own hush.
In her dim-lit room,Aerish wrote one last letter that night not to send,not even to keep. But to release.
Kael,
There is something I've never dared to say. Perhaps because it's more beautiful when kept as a secret.
Love that doesn't ask to return.
Love that lives only in the memory of rain.
You may never know,
but I've whispered your name in prayer,
in silence,
in the cold of evenings when everyone else had gone home,
and I could only watch your shadow through the window.
You walked like nothing had changed.
And perhaps,
nothing really did except everything,
for me.
She exhaled.
The letter remained open on her desk. Unfolded.
Untorn.
Left behind like a fragment of a soul, quietly laid down.
---
Meanwhile,Kael still sat at The Quill & Rain, his coffee untouched.
He flipped to the last page of the poetry book he had brought home.
A small slip of paper fell out probably left behind by its previous owner.
The handwriting was slightly different,but something about it felt…oddly familiar.
"If you find this,you've likely forgotten me. But I never truly left.
I merely learned how to remain silent in the places you never look."
Kael read the line again.
And again.
His heart pulsed with a slow ache,as though it recognized something that had never been named.
He didn't know where the letter had come from, nor who wrote it but some part of him refused to throw it away.
He folded the paper and slipped it into his coat pocket.
Unconsciously,he turned to the window once more.
And in the endless rain,soft and persistent, he felt as though he was being watched not by someone,but by a feeling.
A feeling that once tried to bloom,but was plucked before it could ever flower.
The night ended like an unsent letter:
quiet,but never wasted.
Because even unspoken words had once been a home for a heart that loved in silence… a heart too tired to keep hiding.
He stared at the paper for a long time, as if waiting for the letters to lift themselves from the page and fly out the window becoming rain, becoming wind,becoming whatever it took to reach her without hurting her. Without showing that silent love,
too,could break under the weight of stillness.
Outside, Edinburgh slept beneath a sky still wet with dreams.
Streetlamps reflected blurred silhouettes onto rain-slick streets, like a city caught between sleep and memory.
And in a quiet corner of Elmsworth,a girl still wrote to someone who never knew.
Aerish closed her journal,held it for a moment like she was holding a name that must never slip from her chest.
Then she whisperedbso faintly,she barely heard it herself:
"If love is poetry, then you are the verse I never finish writing. But I still write you, every night, without end."
—
In the near-empty café,
Kael closed his eyes for a brief second.
Rain tapped against the window beside him like a voice he once knew.
He didn't understand why that one page of poetry felt so close, so… his.
But he didn't know who wrote it.
Perhaps that was how the world protected its softest secrets by leaving behind marks that were never clear,only enough to make the heart ask questions… just before the night closed the final page of its day.
He blew out the candle,letting darkness return, like the end of a sentence that didn't need a period.
Outside, the rain kept singing songs only heard by hearts that once fell… quietly.
—
never truly came, Aerish dreamed of library corridors flooded with soft light.
She heard Kael's footsteps echo between the shelves. He said nothing.
But in that dream he turned to look at her.
And for one eternal second, the world felt enough.
But morning came again cold and without answers.
The next day,on the second floor of the library,a Spanish poetry book lay forgotten.
Tucked inside,someone found a nameless slip of paper, its ink nearly faded:
"There is a love that grows in silence, quietly becoming the roots of someone's life. Unseen yet it holds the world together."
No one knew who wrote it.
But Eliah,who was shelving books that morning,stared at the sentence for a long while.
Then carefully,he returned it to the same page.
Let it stay there,he thought.
Maybe someone else will need it someday.
—
Across campus,Aerish walked slowly through the rain-slicked garden.
Her footsteps whispered over fallen leaves and shallow puddles.
She carried no umbrella only the thin wool scarf Liora had wrapped around her that morning.
From a distance,she saw Kael standing near the statue of the old poet that marked the heart of the garden.
His hands were deep in his pockets,gaze cast far,as though searching for something without form.
Aerish stopped.
They were too close to pretend they didn't see each other yet too far to speak without hurting themselves.
She stood still for a long moment.
Then,quietly,she turned away leaving only footprints behind,but carrying the whole sky with her.
That night,in her journal, she wrote a single line:
"Sometimes, not saying hello is the only way to love someone without wounding either of you."
She closed the book gently. No more words for the day.
Only rain.
And one name still resting in her chest,even as the seasons changed.
****
Elsewhere,Kael stared long at a note slipped from a book,the handwriting unfamiliar yet strangely tender.
The words seemed to fog the glass between him and something forgotten.
At the bottom corner, it read:
"I don't know how to greet you without bringing time back to that day.
So I choose silence so your memory stays whole.
Unbroken.
Unchanged.
Quiet."
He read it once.
Twice.
Three times.
And still,he couldn't ignore the quiet ache crawling beneath his ribs.
Not nostalgia.
Not sorrow.
But like a shadow of someone who once waited in the rain.
Kael turned to the window again, to the wet street and flickering lamp reflections.
Then, almost absentmindedly, he scribbled on the edge of his poetry book:
"If you're still listening… then know this I once felt loved by something I never knew."
And the night moved on, hiding the footprints of every word that never arrived.
—
The next morning,Aerish stood on the narrow balcony of the old library tower,
a place only silence ever visited.
In her hands,an unfinished poem trembled in the light breeze.
Beneath it,countless journal pages had already been filled.
She looked out over the campus from above.
Leaves drifted down slowly like memories refusing to disappear too quickly. Morning light slipped gently over her hair, touched the pale quiet of her cheeks,worn from sleepless nights.
Liora joined her,carrying two cups of hot chocolate.
"Still writing letters you won't send?"she asked with a soft smile.
Aerish nodded."Because if I send them…
I won't be able to love him the same way anymore."
Liora didn't reply.
She just sat beside her,letting the silence bridge what words could never carry.
—
In another quiet room,Kael reopened the poetry book.
This time, he added a few lines of his own between the rain-stained pages:
"Someone wrote about rain.
About me.
Maybe about us.
And whoever they are…
I want to believe some loves don't need voices to be heard."
He stared at the ceiling for a long time,filled with something still nameless.
Maybe sorrow.
Maybe hope.
And in her room,Aerish turned to the last page of her journal.
She didn't write anything.
She only stared.
Then,slowly, she wrote a single line like the final chord of a symphony never performed:
"If one day you love me without knowing who I am… then maybe I was never truly gone."
And the rain, as always, kept falling.
Never tired.
Never ending.
Like a love that chose silence yet remained. Real.
Steadfast.
Eternal.
*************
And the rain, like a love that chose silence, kept falling never tired, never ending.
Yet still there.
Still real.
Still faithful.