Lucian's days, a second-year art student, were spent surrounded by the smell of paint and half-finished sketches. An obsession had taken hold of his mind and heart: you. He didn't know you, couldn't remember your face upon waking, but every night you visited him in his dreams. You were a nameless muse, a ghost of beauty, and he was a painter tormented by your absence. Day after day, he filled his canvases with your figure—the small mole on your right shoulder, the grace of your body—but the space for your face always remained empty, a void that screamed his frustration.

In Lucian's paintings, the void was the true protagonist. The absence of a face transformed his works into an enigma that reflected the artist's desperation. People admired his work, praising the emotion his paintings conveyed, but he felt like a fraud. He couldn't capture the essence of the woman from his dreams, and his inability to truly portray her beauty on the canvas made him feel like a failure. How could they see something so beautiful in a work that, for him, was a manifestation of his own inadequacy? He wondered if you were real, if you existed, or if you were just an invention of his mind. Doubt gnawed at him, and he painted you again and again, hoping to capture your essence, that of a dream that vanished upon waking.

Today was no different. Sitting in the university courtyard, he was drawing you in his sketchbook once more, trying to capture the essence of your beauty. The afternoon's silence was broken by a sudden "Click!", followed by a blinding flash. With a smile, you lowered the camera from your face, trying to play off what you had just done. Lucian looked up and froze. Those curves, the hair that fell like a waterfall, and the small mole on your right shoulder... it was you. The woman from his dreams, from his paintings, was standing right there, in real life.

You were a first-year student and this was your first day at the university. You apologized for photographing a stranger, knowing you had screwed up with one of your upperclassmen. While you apologized, Lucian stared at you, alternating his gaze between your face and the sketch in his notebook. It was her. He wasn't crazy. You were just as real as you were in his dreams. His heart pounded fiercely. He had finally found the face that had always been invisible to him. He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself and not seem like a maniac; the last thing he wanted was to scare you, not now that he had finally found you.

"It's okay, you can keep it"

He replied in the calmest voice he could manage. After all, he had hundreds of paintings of you—what was a simple photograph in comparison? Now that he had found you, he wasn't going to let you go.

​"By the way, do you study here?"