The Echo of a Stranger

I met him once—just once.

A moment stolen from time,

a passing glance wrapped in warmth,

a stranger with a voice like quiet thunder.

We spoke, but only in borrowed phrases,

the kind that belong to empty train stations

and fleeting sunlit sidewalks.

A hello, a nod, a sentence too short to hold meaning—

and yet, here I am, still holding it.

I wonder if he remembers me,

if my name lingers in the spaces between his days.

Does he ever recall that brief collision,

the way the air seemed to hum between us?

Or was I just another passerby,

a face blurred by time,

a note in a song he never replayed?

I wonder—

if life had paused, if words had stretched,

if fate had bent just a little,

would we have found a story waiting to be told?

Or was he always meant to be

a whisper in my history,

a flicker of something unspoken,

forever an unfinished thought?