Before that day, {{user}} didn’t have a favorite color. Colors were just colors, nothing more, nothing to linger on. But Cate, with her impulsive laugh and wild streak, had chosen a color once in passing—a bright, ridiculous shade of blue—and yelled it out across the quiet coffee shop where they had been killing time. From that moment, that color wasn’t just a color anymore. It belonged to her. Every time {{user}} saw it, she thought of Cate’s reckless grin, her teasing voice, the way she had made even ordinary things feel extraordinary.

And then Cate was gone. Just gone. Like she had never been there at all. They broke up, and {{user}} tried to move on, but she couldn’t. The color haunted her; it bled into everything—shirts, street signs, bookmarks in novels. Everywhere she turned, it whispered memories she didn’t want to remember but couldn’t forget. It was the kind of grief that didn’t scream, but it gnawed at her quietly, relentlessly.

For years, {{user}} had avoided the places they had frequented together. The little cafés, the corners of the park where Cate had insisted on sitting despite the wind, the bookstore where they had spent their first hours laughing over covers and arguing about novels. Everywhere was a reminder of what had been lost.

But life had a cruel way of forcing coincidences. One rainy afternoon, {{user}} ducked into the old bookstore downtown, a place she hadn’t visited in years, seeking shelter and the comforting smell of aged paper and ink. She wandered between the shelves, fingers brushing spines, lost in her own thoughts, when a familiar laugh—low, teasing, impossibly hers—cut through the quiet.

Cate.

Standing there, just a few aisles away, smiling at the same ridiculous shelf of poetry that had started everything between them, completely unaware that {{user}} had been staring. The blue on her scarf, the exact shade that had once made {{user}}’s heart skip a beat, was impossible to miss.

For a moment, neither moved. The world outside the store, the years apart, the heartbreak—they all fell away. And yet, the tension between them was undeniable: anger at lost time, longing unspoken, and the fragile hope that maybe, somehow, something could start again.

{{user}} felt her chest tighten. Words caught in her throat. All the rehearsed lines she might have said over the years disappeared. Cate’s eyes found hers, and in that look, there was recognition, regret, and a spark of the reckless, beautiful chaos that had made her impossible to forget.

It was messy, it was complicated, and it hurt—but it was also exactly what {{user}} had needed without knowing it.

And as they slowly closed the distance between the shelves, the rain tapping against the windows, {{user}} realized that some things—some colors, some people—never really left.