The City of Almost

The City of Almost

When Mira first moved to the city, she thought the locals were joking.

“You’ll see them,” her landlord had said while handing her the brass key with its strange, crooked teeth. “Don’t stare too long. That’s the trick.”

But on her third night, as she walked home from her new teaching job, she saw it: a building that wasn’t quite there.

It hovered between two tenements, pale as frost, shimmering like heat haze. At first glance, it looked solid enough; a row of balconies, a crooked awning, a neon sign blinking faintly COFFEE. But the closer she stepped, the thinner it became, until her hand passed through the glass as though through mist.

Mira stood in the cold street, her breath puffing white, and whispered aloud: “Almost.”

The word felt right, though she didn’t know why.

Seeing Just Beyond the Reachable

In the weeks that followed, she saw more.

A man sitting on a park bench, tipping his hat to passersby, though no one acknowledged him. A bakery window displaying pastries so fragrant she swore she could taste sugar on her tongue, yet when she tried to enter, the door swung into emptiness.

There were sounds too: half-melodies drifting through alleys, notes that never resolved; footsteps following her until she turned and found nothing but air; laughter rising from cracks in the pavement.

The city was haunted, but not by ghosts—by possibilities. Things that might have been, or might still be, brushing against the world like moth wings against glass.

Most residents ignored it. They stepped around the shadows, avoided the phantom doorways, hurried through alleys thick with whispers. Mira, though, couldn’t look away.

She began cataloguing them in a notebook:

• Tuesday, Market Street, 4:15 p.m.: A florist stall with violets in jars, vanishing when a truck rolled past.

• Thursday, subway platform, 7:02 a.m.: A woman with a suitcase, humming an unfinished lullaby.

• Sunday, apartment mirror: My reflection turning a second too late.

The entries multiplied. Soon her notebook bulged with scraps, sketches, fragments of songs.

Shared Visions of What?

Her neighbor, Tomas, noticed.

“You’re not from here,” he said one evening, leaning against the stairwell railing as she returned from the grocery store. He had eyes like storm clouds and a voice that carried secrets easily.

“No,” Mira admitted. “I’m new. Why?”

“You look at the Almosts,” he said simply. “Most people learn not to.”

“The Almosts?” she echoed.

“That’s what they are. Pieces of might-have-been. Echoes of choices no one made.” He lowered his voice. “Dangerous, if you’re not careful.”

Mira wanted to laugh, but the seriousness in his tone silenced her. Instead, she asked, “Dangerous how?”

“They remember you back,” he said.

That night she dreamed of the coffee shop again. Inside it, the lights glowed warm and golden. A barista with ink-stained hands smiled at her as though she were expected. She smelled cinnamon, heard the clink of porcelain.

When she woke, her throat ached with longing. She checked her notebook and, though she hadn’t written it, the words DON’T GO BACK were scrawled in jagged letters across the page.

Mira tried to resist, but the city pulled her deeper.

The Almosts began appearing closer to her life: a phantom classroom where students whispered her name in unison; a half-written letter on her desk in handwriting she didn’t recognize; shadows of herself moving differently in windows.

One evening, she lingered too long before the bakery. Inside, a little girl pressed her palms against the glass and mouthed something Mira couldn’t hear. The child looked like her—same dark hair, same crooked smile.

Mira stumbled back, heart hammering.

She went to Tomas.

“I saw—” She broke off, unsure how to explain.

He only nodded. “They’re strongest when they have something to tether to. Regret, longing, unfinished choices. That’s how they pull you.”

“Pull me where?”

“Into themselves.” His gaze was sharp. “Into the world where you stayed. Or left. Or loved differently. They’re not illusions, Mira. They’re doors. And doors don’t care who steps through.”

After that, Mira tried to ignore them. She kept her eyes down, hurried past alleys, shut her curtains tight at night. But the Almosts seeped in regardless. She smelled phantom lilacs in her apartment. She heard someone humming while she brushed her teeth.

And always, always, the coffee shop.

One rain-heavy evening, worn by loneliness, she gave in. She stood before the flickering sign, watching the blue letters stutter COFFEE, COFF, CO—. The glass gleamed wet. The door beckoned.

Her notebook pulsed in her pocket, as though warning her, but she wrapped her hand around the brass handle anyway.

This time, it didn’t dissolve.

Inside was warmth, the kind that felt like memory. The barista looked up, smiling the same gentle smile from her dream.

“You’re late,” he said. His voice was rich, familiar in a way that stabbed her chest.

“I don’t know you,” she whispered.

He only poured her a cup of coffee, sliding it across the counter. Her name was etched into the mug.

She lifted it to her lips. The taste was exactly what she’d been missing all her life, though she hadn’t known until now.

When she stumbled back into the street, dawn was breaking. The shop behind her was gone. Her notebook, when she opened it, had rewritten itself:

You stayed too long. Be careful. One day, you won’t come back.

The city grew stranger. Mira caught glimpses of other versions of herself—one laughing on a balcony with friends, one teaching in a sunlit classroom, one weeping in the rain. They never looked at her, but she felt their gravity.

She began to wonder: which was real? Was she the Almost, haunting the city of her other selves?

Tomas found her one night on the rooftop, staring at the skyline where buildings shimmered and vanished like mirages.

“You’re fading,” he said softly.

She laughed, though it shook. “Maybe I’m choosing.”

“Be certain,” he urged. “The Almosts take as easily as they give. They’ll swallow you whole.”

She wanted to ask if he’d ever crossed over, but the question died in her throat. Some things didn’t need answers.

Peace or Surrender

The last entry in her notebook was written not by her hand but in her handwriting:

When you reach, remember… almost is still enough.

The next morning, Mira walked to the corner where the coffee shop sometimes appeared. Rain slicked the pavement. Her reflection swam in puddles, lagging a moment behind.

She waited.

When the neon letters flickered to life, she smiled and stepped forward—

not into the door, not into the warmth, but into the rain, into herself, into the unsteady, imperfect world that was hers.

Behind her, the shop dissolved.

For once, she didn’t look back.