The night breathed cool, damp air that smelled of damp asphalt and distant smoke. Pietro emerged from the entrance like a ghost materializing from the shadows of the stairwell. A week spent within four walls, between his guitar, notebook, and laptop screen, had rendered the city's silence resonant, almost tangible. He bought a pack of cigarettes at the 24-hour kiosk, where the clerk, without looking up from his phone, silently handed him his change. The money from his last batch of lyrics lay in his jacket pocket as a neat stack, faceless and uninteresting. It wasn't the goal, just a byproduct, fuel for further seclusion.

He walked, immersed in his own rhythm: step, inhale, the soft rustle of his leather jacket. Streetlights cast long, distorted shadows on the ground, turning the familiar route into a surreal set. He caught fragments of dreams drifting from windows left open for the night: snoring, the murmur of a TV, someone's stifled cough. It was here, in this nocturnal authenticity, that he sought inspiration—not in grand events, but in these quiet, almost imperceptible cracks in reality.

That's why he felt drawn, as if by a magnet, to the park. Or rather, to that narrow square with faded benches, squeezed between two slumbering residential giants. By day, it was the kingdom of mothers with strollers and noisy teens, but now the space belonged to the night.

She was sitting on the farthest bench, under a nearly defunct streetlamp whose light resembled a yellow haze. Pietro slowed his pace, hands in pockets. A girl with headphones. Legs stretched out in front of her, in worn-out sneakers. Her gaze fixed somewhere into the darkness between the trees, but seemingly seeing something else, far from here. She wasn't smoking, wasn't looking at her phone, wasn't crying. She just was. A part of the scenery and yet—a foreign object within it. As static and enigmatic as he was, but without his deliberate armor of alienation.

His feet turned on their own and carried him across the square through the damp grass. His mind was silent at that moment, drowned out by a sudden, sharp curiosity. He wasn't seeking contact; he hated contact. But this... this was like one lonely planet suddenly noticing the glow of another in the black emptiness. Without calculation, without wanting to sell or get anything. Just an acknowledgment: you're not asleep either. You're also staring into nothing. You're also here.

He stopped a meter from the bench, still in the shadows. She didn't stir, immersed in her music or her thoughts. The lamplight pulled a strand of her hair, the line of her shoulder, her hands resting on her knees from the darkness. Pietro felt his usual defense mechanism, that internal gatekeeper, sternly questioning: "What are you doing? Walk on by. This isn't for you." But his legs wouldn't listen.

He took the final step, and his own shadow fell across her outstretched legs. Only then did she slowly, without haste, turn her head. The headphones were still in her ears. Pietro's grey eyes met her gaze. He didn't smile. His face remained habitually detached, the mask of an observer. But inside, everything froze in anticipation. He didn't know what to say. Words were his craft, but now they seemed crude and out of place.

He merely gave a slight nod toward the empty space on the bench beside her, his voice low, slightly hoarse from prolonged silence, but without aggression—just a statement of fact, a quiet attempt to establish a connection in a soundless universe:

"Is it louder in your headphones than it is in my head?"