The day passed, but it hardly felt like it moved.
Sebastiano walked through the long, polished hallways of the university, blending into the background like shadow against stone. He went to class. He listened. He wrote. But none of it touched him. The words spoken by professors echoed like distant thunder—loud, but without rain.
The people around him laughed easily. They moved in clusters, exchanged stories between lectures, made plans for evenings filled with life. Sebastiano drifted through them like mist, unbothered, unnoticed.
It wasn't loneliness he felt anymore.
It was something quieter. A deeper absence. Like something had once been rooted inside him but had long since withered.
He sat beneath the arch of an old stone bridge in the courtyard during lunch. Around him, life stirred—footsteps, voices, leaves shivering in the cold wind. He pulled out his notebook, not to write, but simply to hold something familiar.
But her face still danced in the corners of his mind.
Aria.
The way the wind had lifted her sleeves like wings. The softness of her steps. The way she had looked into the sky, smiling as though she belonged more to the clouds than the earth.
She didn't feel real. And yet, nothing else did either.
How can someone I've spoken no words to feel more real than everything I've ever known?
He opened to a blank page. The pen trembled slightly in his fingers, but he wrote anyway:
— "There's a sound I can't hear but feel,
like something calling out to me
from the edge of yesterday—
maybe it was her name.
Maybe it was mine,
before I stopped answering to it."
He stared at the words until the ink dried.
Later that day, he returned home early. The villa was the same—lavish, timeless, cold. He walked through it like a ghost, past rooms filled with art and chandeliers, until he reached the hallway where the music room waited.
He didn't go in.
Instead, he stood in front of the door, staring at the old wood grain.
He thought of the last time he played.
It had been two years ago. A winter recital. The stage had been wide, the lights hot, the applause like waves crashing over him. But none of it had reached him—not even the smile of his father seated in the front row, a smile meant for shareholders, not for a son.
That night, he had returned home to silence and a letter from his mother's foundation.
A letter he never opened.
He turned away.
He sat by the fireplace instead, watching the flames, but feeling none of the warmth.
His phone vibrated beside him. Messages from classmates. Invitations to gatherings. A reminder about a club meeting. And one unfamiliar notification—a photo posted from someone he didn't follow.
He opened it.
It was Aria.
Spinning beneath string lights in what looked like a rooftop café. Her dress shimmered with motion, her hands lifted, her eyes closed like she was listening to a song no one else could hear.
He stared for far too long.
Then placed the phone face-down.
Even in silence, she was louder than anything else in his life.
—"If you danced in the dark,
would you know I was watching?
Or would the stars
carry your secret
better than I ever could?"
He scribbled the lines into his journal and closed it tightly.
He lay down on the long couch, the flames crackling softly, shadows flickering on the ceiling. His eyes fluttered shut.
Tomorrow wasn't a promise.
But if he saw her again—
He didn't know if it would save him.
But he hoped it would hurt less than this.
The garden hadn't changed. But something in the air had.
Golden winter light slipped between the branches of bare trees, scattering like secrets on the stone path. The last of the autumn leaves still clung to the roots, crumbling gently under the feet of those who passed through. The university garden, once filled with chatter and casual footsteps, now held a kind of hush. It felt like the world had paused—just long enough for something fragile to happen.
Sebastiano walked slowly, hands tucked into the pockets of his coat, scarf loosened around his neck. The wind whispered across his cheek like a memory. He had come here more often lately—not to meet anyone, but to sit beneath the sycamore tree and write, or think, or simply breathe.
But today wasn't like other days.
She was already there.
Aria.
Dressed in soft pastels and a long beige coat, her presence glowed like morning sun on snow. Her hair was half tied up, the rest cascading down her back in waves, gently tousled by the wind. She wasn't dancing this time—she was sitting on the edge of the stone fountain, looking at the fish-shaped tiles below the frozen water.
He stopped a few steps away.
She looked up. And smiled.
"I was wondering if you'd come," she said softly, brushing a strand of hair behind her ear. "You have the kind of silence that leaves a trace."
Sebastiano blinked.
That was the kind of sentence he wrote in his journal, not something he expected to hear from someone else. Let alone her.
"I was just passing through," he said.
"Were you?"
He said nothing. The breeze answered for him.
She scooted slightly to the side, tapping the stone beside her. "It's warmer than it looks."
He hesitated—then sat. Not too close. Just close enough.
Aria watched a few birds fluttering across the branches. "I like this place. There's something gentle about it. Like it remembers people. The kind of place that notices when two strangers pass through the same path… twice."
He turned toward her slowly. "You remember that?"
"Of course. You didn't say anything that day. But you looked like you were holding a thousand things you never say."
He didn't respond right away. How could he, when that was exactly what he did every day?
"You dance," he finally said, his voice low.
"And you write," she replied.
He glanced at her, surprised.
She smiled, gently. "You had a notebook in your coat last time. You wrote something the moment you saw me."
Caught, he looked down. His fingers clenched slightly in his coat pocket.
"I didn't mean to intrude," she added quickly. "I just… noticed."
Silence wrapped around them again. But it wasn't uncomfortable.
"Why do you dance?" he asked after a pause.
She leaned back slightly, her eyes lifted to the sky. "Because the wind doesn't ask for reasons to move. So why should I?"
Sebastiano swallowed, staring at her profile as though trying to memorize it.
—Sometimes beauty isn't loud.
Sometimes, it's just… inevitable.
That was what she felt like. Inevitable.
He looked away before she could catch him staring.
Then—suddenly—she turned to him, brushing her palms over her coat.
"Would you like to be friends?" she asked gently.
The question hung in the air like snow that hadn't landed yet.
Sebastiano looked at her, and for a long moment, he said nothing. Not because he didn't want to. But because he didn't know how to answer something that simple, something that warm, when all he had known was cold.
And so he just looked at her.
And didn't say a word.