“She is a dream, and I am just a dreamer.”

She was the kind of girl that made the world stop moving — not because she demanded attention, but because she carried stillness like a secret. People noticed her the way you notice a falling star: a quiet gasp, a wish whispered too late.

And I? I was no one.

Just a boy with stories in his head and skies in his eyes. A dreamer. A romantic. A watcher of people I’d never have the courage to love.

But then came her.

I saw her first on the metro. The kind of chance encounter that doesn’t feel like chance at all — like maybe the universe was bored that day and decided to throw me a moment worth remembering. She sat by the window, headphones in, the world reflecting off the glass like a painting only she could see.

I couldn’t look away.

Not because she was beautiful — though she was, in a quiet, soft-focus kind of way — but because she looked like a story waiting to be told. Like every page of her life was written in poetry, but no one had read it yet.

And I wanted to be the one to read her.

I didn’t speak to her that day. Or the next. I saw her again and again, always in that same seat, always in her own world. And I sat across from her, writing lines in my head, building entire futures with someone who didn’t even know my name.

I was content just to witness her.

Until one day, the train stalled. The lights flickered. And for the first time, she looked up — right at me.

"Do you ride this train every day?" she asked, her voice like wind through leaves.

I nodded, suddenly unsure how to speak.

She smiled. “I’ve seen you. Always writing.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “I write about dreams,” I said.

"And which one am I?" she asked, eyes dancing.

"The most impossible one," I whispered.

And that was how it began.

Days blurred into weeks. Conversations into shared coffees, long walks after the train, inside jokes, soft glances. She let me in slowly, like a song building to its chorus. Her name was Arielle, and she lived like a poem written in fading ink — all beauty, all tragedy.

She was curious, restless, a wanderer at heart. She talked about traveling the world, chasing light across mountaintops, and dancing in cities whose names I couldn’t even pronounce. She belonged to the skies. I belonged to the ground.

Still, I fell.

I told myself not to. Told myself she was too wild for someone like me — a boy who found magic in routine, who planted roots too easily. But the heart doesn’t care for warnings.

She was a dream. And I was just a dreamer.

We were fire and shadow. She burned too bright for me to hold. But I kept reaching, thinking maybe—just maybe—she’d choose to stay.

She never did.

One morning, she was gone. Just a note left on the windowsill:

"You loved me gently. That’s what I’ll remember. But I was never meant to stay. Don’t stop dreaming — just don’t dream of me anymore."

— A.

It hurt in the quiet way heartbreak always does. Not in a loud, cinematic collapse — but in the still moments. The coffee brewed for two. The seat across from me now empty. The way I instinctively wrote her name in the margins of my notebook.

It’s been months now. She sends postcards sometimes. No return address. Just snapshots of sunsets, cliffs, and seas. She always writes the same thing:

"Still dreaming. Are you?"

And I always whisper my answer to the wind:

“Yes. Always.”

Because the truth is, she was a dream. Something too pure, too fleeting for the real world.

And I?

I’m still the dreamer.

The one who knew from the start that some loves aren’t meant to be kept — just remembered.

So I write about her.

Every day.

To keep her alive in the only place she’ll never leave —

my dreams.