somewhere between sugar packets
I used to work in a little café by the train station.
A stop-and-go kind of place where the mornings came fast, the faces blurred,
and the clock always ran ahead of me.
Back then, I was living small.
Not invisible, exactly, just muted.
I didn’t yet know the shape of my own beauty.
Didn’t yet know that being seen could feel like being held.
Then one day, in the middle of the noise,
he arrived.
Tall. Brown hair. Soft eyes. A warmth I didn’t have a name for.
He ordered a hot chocolate.
He smiled, and it lingered.
The next day he came again.
And again.
His presence became a soft rhythm in the chaos.
And gradually, I found myself thinking of him.
Not outwardly. Not obviously.
But inside, where the quiet lives.
And then one morning he spilled his drink.
Fingers fumbling, laugh warm, and then:
“It’s your fault. I get nervous around you.”
I looked up. Really looked.
And there he was — smiling like he meant it.
Like nervousness was worth it.
Another day, he asked casually,
“Will you be here Sunday?”
I nodded.
He grinned.
“Then that’s a date.”
He said it so easily. Like it had always been meant to happen.
And maybe it was.
But life wasn’t soft around me back then.
There were things I couldn’t leave behind.
Stories I was still stuck inside.
So nothing ever came of it.
No real ending. No beginning.
Just that one moment:
The day I came out from the back,
arms full of supplies,
head full of distraction,
and there he was, already waiting at the counter.
Looking at me like someone had turned on all the lights.
Like I was something he’d been waiting to see for a long, long time.
Like I was sunlight, and stars, and something holy all at once.
That’s when it struck me:
I want to be looked at like that forever.
I didn’t chase it.
Couldn’t.
I let him go. Saw the disappointment in his face.
Our moment passed like the train he may have taken that afternoon.
But I’ve never forgotten him.
Not for what he said.
But for what he made me feel:
that I was seen before I even knew how to look at myself.
— Lux
