The Notebook I Found in the Rain

It was a Tuesday like any other — gray, drizzling, the kind of rain that doesn’t soak you but sneaks into your sleeves and settles in your bones. I wasn’t planning to go anywhere that day. In fact, I’d promised myself I’d stay home, nurse my recent breakup with leftover wine and sad movies. But something about the way the sky looked made me want to escape my apartment and, more honestly, my own head.

I ducked into a small coffee shop I’d passed a dozen times but never noticed. The windows were fogged, the inside dimly lit with warm yellow bulbs, jazz humming in the background. It smelled like cinnamon and something vaguely nostalgic. The place was mostly empty — a man in a corner typing frantically, a woman sketching something abstract in a notepad. I ordered a chai latte and sat near the window, hoping to disappear.

It wasn’t long before I noticed the notebook.

It was left behind on the table next to mine — thick, leather-bound, and weathered at the edges. At first, I ignored it. I wasn’t the type to go through someone else’s things. But something about it called to me. Maybe it was the way it was left — not forgotten, but almost deliberately placed, like a trap or a treasure. I glanced around. No one seemed to be coming back for it.

I reached for it.

The first page was a sketch of a woman — hair wild, eyes intense, the kind of face that felt familiar even if you’d never seen it before. The next few pages were poems. Short ones. A few messy, a few carefully crafted. The ink bled on some pages, as if tears or rain had smudged them. Each entry was signed with the initials J.D.

I know I should’ve stopped. But I couldn’t.

One poem caught my breath:

“You think you've broken me,

But I was already broken —

You just held the mirror long enough

For me to see it.”

It felt like someone had written it from inside my own heart.

I asked the barista if anyone had come looking for a notebook. She shook her head, offered to hold it behind the counter in case someone returned. I hesitated but left it with her, leaving my number just in case.

That night, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. About the poems. The sketch. The mystery of J.D. I told myself it was curiosity, not loneliness, pulling me back the next day.

On Wednesday, the notebook was still there. No one had claimed it. Thursday, same. Friday, I stayed longer, reading at a table near the door, half-hoping, half-ashamed.

Then came Saturday.

I was sipping my drink, rereading one of the poems I’d scribbled down from memory, when the bell above the door rang. I looked up — and he walked in.

Wavy brown hair, dark coat damp from rain, eyes scanning the room like he was searching for something. When his eyes met mine, I didn’t look away.

“Hi,” he said to the barista. “Did someone find a notebook here?”

She gestured to the counter, then to me. “She found it.”

He looked over, surprised. Grateful.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for this,” he said, holding it like it was something sacred.

“It’s… beautiful,” I said before I could stop myself. “The poems, the sketches. I only looked because it felt like it wanted to be read.”

He smiled. “That was kind of the point.”

I blinked. “You left it… on purpose?”

He nodded. “I leave them sometimes. In places I go when I’m feeling lost. I figure someone who needs to read it will find it.”

We sat down together. Talked. For hours. About art, heartbreak, coincidences. He was a graphic designer who wrote poetry to survive his own losses. I was a copywriter who forgot how to feel until I read words that weren’t mine.

When we finally left the café, the rain had stopped. The sky was still gray, but something in me felt brighter.

Over the weeks that followed, we saw each other more. We shared stories, pages from our lives we hadn’t shown anyone else. He gave me a notebook of my own, blank pages waiting to be filled. I started writing again. Really writing. Not for work, but for myself.

It’s been a year now.

Sometimes, I still wonder what would’ve happened if I hadn’t walked into that coffee shop. If I hadn’t opened a stranger’s notebook. If I hadn’t believed, even just for a moment, that maybe the universe plants breadcrumbs for us — and all we have to do is follow them.