The poem stayed in my coat pocket like a secret.
I didn't unfold it again, not even when I got home and dropped my keys in the bowl by the door, not even when I curled up on the couch with a blanket pulled over my knees. It stayed pressed between fabric and thread, quietly pulsing against my side, as if reading itself into me even when I wasn't looking.
I kept replaying the moment he handed it to me , not the words, not even the nearness of him, but the way his eyes had softened before he turned away. There was something unsent in them. Something he hadn't said. Something I was afraid to read between the lines.
I told myself I wouldn't go to the reading.
I told myself it didn't matter.
But the truth is, some absences write themselves into the page louder than presence ever could.
The next morning I woke with a poem lodged behind my ribs. Not mine. His. Or maybe both.
I stood in the kitchen, stirring coffee I wasn't drinking, watching the pale gray light smear across the counter like fog, and I kept thinking: He wants me to show up. And not just to sit in the back row. Not just to watch. But to be part of something I wasn't sure I could carry.
Thursday was three days away.
And I didn't know how to hold silence that long.
Later that day, I wandered into the library near the art school. It was mostly empty , high ceilings, quiet corners, and the smell of old pages that always made me feel a little steadier. I sat down at a long wooden table near the window, pulled out my notebook, and tried to write.
But nothing came.
Not even the half-truths I usually fed myself.
Instead, I found myself drawing shapes , loops, circles, words I didn't mean. The kind of scribbling that made it look like I was working but really I was just avoiding.
"You look like you're arguing with a ghost," someone said.
I looked up.
A woman in a marigold scarf stood across the table, holding a thick book about narrative therapy. She was my age, maybe a little younger, with sharp eyes and a kind mouth.
"I'm not interrupting, am I?" she asked.
I blinked. "No. Just arguing with myself."
She smiled and slid into the chair across from me.
"I'm Mercy," she said, extending a hand.
"Nice to meet you," I said. "I'm..."
"I know who you are," she interrupted gently. "I saw you at the panel."
I flinched.
She held up her hands, laughing. "I'm not a stalker. I was just… listening. I liked your silence. It was honest."
I couldn't help but laugh. "That's one way to put it."
We sat for a moment, the quiet between us easy.
"I'm a screenwriter," she said, opening her book. "Sort of. Mostly I teach high school literature and write on the side. But I tell myself stories to stay alive. Doesn't that count?"
I nodded. "More than most."
We talked for an hour. About words. About doubt. About how hard it is to say things out loud that you only ever dared to write in a journal or a poem or a late-night text you never sent.
Mercy was disarming , not pushy, not loud, just present.
When I mentioned D.K., I didn't use his name.
I said, "There's someone whose writing scares me because it sees too much."
She tilted her head. "And does it also make you want to be seen?"
I swallowed. "That's the part that hurts."
Before she left, she scribbled her number in the margin of my notebook.
"For when you're ready to say the thing," she said.
"What thing?"
"The one you keep writing around."
Then she winked and walked out, leaving her book behind.
That night, I finally unfolded the paper D.K. had given me.
It wasn't a poem.
It was a fragment.
"There's a part of me that never left your doorway.
That part wants to know what your silence means.
I'll read the rest if you show up."
No signature.
Just that.
I traced the words with my finger. My breath caught in my throat , not because of what he wrote, but because I had no answer.
What did my silence mean?
Fear? Love? A kind of grief I hadn't named yet?
Maybe all of it.
Maybe nothing.
Wednesday came. Then Thursday morning.
I stayed home most of the day, turning over the poem in my mind, alternating between certainty and dread. I told myself I didn't have to go. That some stories didn't need an ending. That some things were better left unsent.
But by 6:30 p.m., I was standing in front of my closet like a teenager before her first dance.
I pulled on a soft black sweater, jeans that didn't scream effort, and left my hair loose. I didn't wear makeup, but I put on the lipstick he once said reminded him of dusk.
The venue was across town. I walked.
I needed the time to steady my breath.
The reading was at a small café with mismatched chairs and candlelit tables. It was already filling up when I arrived. I slipped in just as the host called out the lineup. D.K.'s name was last.
Of course it was.
He sat in the back corner, waiting his turn, notebook in hand.
He didn't see me.
Or maybe he did, and pretended not to.
I didn't sit this time.
I stood near the bookshelf, one hand braced against the spines like they could hold me up. I listened to three other poets talk about broken things and healing, about love in the shape of a scar, about leaving and returning and all the spaces in between.
Then it was D.K.'s turn.
He stepped up to the mic, paper shaking slightly in his hands. He didn't clear his throat. He didn't look around.
He just began.
"I wrote this for the one who never writes back.
For the one whose silence says more than yes or no.
For the one who left the door open, but never stepped through."
My chest burned.
He kept going.
"You taught me that almost is a full sentence.
That longing can have weight.
That sometimes, love arrives dressed as fear and refuses to take off its coat."
He paused.
His eyes found mine.
"I want you to know...
I'm still standing in the doorway."
Silence fell.
The kind that doesn't ask for applause.
Then he stepped back.
Folded the paper.
And walked out the back door.
I didn't follow him.
Not right away.
I just stood there, trying to breathe around the ache in my ribs.
Around the truth I hadn't yet written.
And the words I had never dared to send.