But I didn't know that today was going to be different.

As I pushed the heavy metal door open, I froze.

She was there standing brigthly in the open sky, looking up at the blue sky.

The girl from this morning. The one chasing the dog. Her hair caught the sunlight as the wind played with it, and for a moment, I almost thought I was still trapped in my dream.

She noticed me and smiled softly. “Ah… sorry. Is this your spot? I don’t usually come up here, but my friends are absent today, so…”

Her voice carried that strange echo again—the one that felt both familiar and unreachable, like something I had already lost once.

I shook my head. “No, it’s fine. I don’t mind.”

I said almost too quickly. 

She faintly smiled on my quick response as almost she was really happy.

I sat down a few feet away, trying to ignore the pull I felt toward her. She opened her own lunch and glanced over at me.

“You always eat alone?” she asked.

I hesitated. No one had asked me that before. Not in years.

“…Yeah. I guess I’m just used to it.”

She smiled, not out of pity, but as if she understood something unspoken. “Sometimes… being alone feels peaceful. But it’s also lonely, isn’t it?”

Her words slipped into me like a key turning inside a lock. I looked at her properly then—her eyes bright against the endless blue sky, her presence warming a part of me I thought had long frozen.

We talked a bit. About classes. About the dog. About nothing and everything. And in that short lunch break, I felt something inside me shift, like the walls I had built were cracking, letting a little light through.

When the bell rang, she stood and brushed off her skirt. “See you around.”

Her voice lingered in my ears long after she left.

And for the first time in a long time, I found myself smiling without even realizing it.

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