He Was a Poem I Could Never Finish

There are people you meet who feel like a punctuation mark—short, sharp, definitive. And then there are the ones who feel like poetry. He was the latter. A stanza that started in a storm and left me searching for a final line I could never write.

We met in the most unpoetic place—a coffee shop that smelled more like burnt ambition than roasted beans. I was there every morning, laptop open, pretending I was writing the next great novel. He walked in like he owned time, confidence tucked behind messy curls and a navy-blue scarf that looked too warm for October. He ordered chamomile tea. Who drinks chamomile tea at 8 a.m.?

He smiled at me once. Just once. But it stretched across the room like a metaphor I couldn’t quite interpret. He didn’t ask for my number. He didn’t sit beside me. He didn’t say a word. But from that moment, my mornings had a rhythm.

He became a part of my routine without even knowing it. I wrote better when he was around. I’d type out lines and imagine his voice reading them back to me. When he missed a morning, I’d stare at my blank screen like it had betrayed me.

And then one day, he spoke.

“You’re always here,” he said, pulling the chair across from me without asking.

“So are you,” I replied.

He smiled again. “Touché.”

That was the beginning of our poem.

It wasn’t a love story in the traditional sense. There were no candlelit dinners, no grand gestures. We became companions in silence, in sarcasm, in shared playlists and forgotten coffee orders. He would read the nonsense I wrote and call it “almost profound.” I’d tell him he dressed like a poet from the 1800s. He laughed like the world hadn’t bruised him yet.

But I could see it in his eyes—his verses were written in invisible ink. There were things about him that stayed tucked between the lines. I never asked. Maybe I should’ve.

One rainy Tuesday, he didn’t show up.

Not the next day. Not the next week.

The coffee shop returned to its dull hum. My writing? Flat. Forced. Like trying to rhyme words that didn’t belong together.

I tried not to care. Told myself it was just a routine. Just a stranger. Just caffeine chemistry. But that lie tasted bitterer than the espresso.

Two months later, I found him again. Not in the shop, but in a bookstore, in the corner aisle where forgotten poems go to die. He looked thinner. His eyes darker. He smiled when he saw me—but this one was different. Apologetic. Exhausted.

“Hey,” he said.

“You disappeared.”

“I had to.”

He didn’t elaborate. I didn’t push. We stood there like two unfinished sonnets.

“I missed you,” I admitted, softer than I meant.

“I missed this,” he whispered, pointing to nothing and everything between us.

I asked him if he was okay. He nodded. But poets lie too.

We met twice more after that. Each time felt like the last chapter of a book someone forgot to publish. Eventually, he stopped coming again. And this time, I didn’t chase the ending. I knew by then that some stories are meant to stay incomplete.

Now, every time I hear a certain song or sip chamomile tea I don’t even like, I think of him. He exists in fragments. In half-written journal entries and lines that never quite rhyme.

He was a poem I could never finish—not because I didn’t want to, but because he was never mine to complete. He belonged to the unwritten. The undefined. The fleeting.

And maybe that’s okay.

Because some people aren’t meant to be stories.

They’re meant to be verses.

Echoes.

Hauntingly beautiful beginnings…

With no end.