The rain came back slow that year, like someone remembering how to cry.
By then, her old balcony was just another window. New curtains, new laughter. Still, sometimes when Alex walked by at night, he looked up. It was a habit now a quiet kind of hope that refused to die.

Life didn’t stop, it just got smaller.
He didn’t talk about her anymore, but she stayed in small things, in half-played songs, in messages, in the way silence felt heavier some nights.
She had become part of his thinking, like breathing.

He met her again one evening, by accident, at a cafe near the bus stop.
He heard her laugh first, that same laugh that had once made everything else fade out. When he turned, she was there. Shorter hair, same eyes. Time had drawn new lines around her, but her voice still sounded like home.

“Alex,” she said.
He smiled, small. “Hey.”

They didn’t hug. Didn’t even move closer.

They talked the way people do after a tragedy careful, calm, pretending the wreckage wasn’t still between them.
She told him about work. He told her about his new routine. She laughed at something small, and for a second it was like they’d never broken.

She looked down at her cup.

“You always think too much.”
“You always said that,” he replied.

The quiet between them felt familiar like something that had lived too long to die properly.

He remembered how, months ago, they had dreamed about marrying someday, about walking under cherry blossoms in Japan.
It felt far away now, but not gone.
He remembered calling her his safe place because that’s what she was. The one person who made him feel steady, alive, comfortable just being himself.

“You were my calm,” he thought. “My reason to breathe softer.”

He wanted to tell her all of that. That he still couldn’t move forward. That he still loved her the same way he did at the start. Not less, not more, just the same stubborn way. But words like that don’t fit in small cafes.

When she stood up to leave, she hesitated.
“I missed this,” she said. “.
“Yeah Me too,” he said. 

For a moment, the air felt thick with something unspoken.

“Maybe love doesn’t disappear,” he thought. “It just learns how to stay quiet.”

She smiled, and said, “Take care of yourself, Alex.”
“You too.”

Her sleeve brushed his arm as she passed. That was all. But he knew he’d remember the warmth of that small touch longer than most things in his life.

After she left, he stayed behind, listening to the rain against the glass. Then he pulled out his mobile and opened notepad and wrote:

“You were my safe space.
You were the place I felt alive.
I still love you like the first day.
I don’t know how to move forward.”

He paused, then added one more line something he had only just begun to understand:

“Maybe real love starts after the feeling ends, when there’s no fire left, just warmth you still carry.”

That night, he walked home through puddles, the streetlights breaking across the water. He looked at his reflection, tired eyes, steady breath and didn’t feel healed, but he didn’t feel lost either.

Far away, in her hotel room, she opened his old messages again.
She didn’t delete them this time.
She smiled faintly and whispered into the quiet,

“Goodnight, Alex.”

And somewhere not in time, not in distance, but in the small still space between forgetting and remembering they both kept a little piece of what they were.
Not enough to start again, not enough to end completely.
Just enough to prove that what they had was real.

“Some stories don’t end,” he thought, closing the notepad. “They just learn to live quietly inside you.”

I hope you liked this story.
I wrote it on the night of November 2nd 

I don’t even know when you’ll read it. Maybe you never will. Maybe you’ll reply, or maybe this will just stay as something unfinished between us.

If you’re reading this, maybe it means we finally finished the song… or maybe we didn’t.
Either way, I still love you (CC) even if things never go back to normal.

Also there is one thing i wanted to i will tell this when you text me

Take care of yourself.
I hope, wherever you are, you stay happy with whomever you're with.