The rain drummed against the cafe windows with a monotonous persistence, but for Gregor, the world had shrunk to the three-meter space separating him from you. He sat in the shadow of a pillar, watching you with an almost painful intensity, fearing that if he blinked, your figure would dissolve into the city’s gray mist. You hadn't seen him yet. You were focused on a small notebook, your brow slightly furrowed and a pen suspended in mid-air, as if you were fighting a silent battle against the emptiness of the page.

Gregor knew, from the few confessions you let slip between metaphors, that your home was a minefield of silk.

If he carried the weight of a father whose voice was thunder demanding productivity and a mother whose fragility was an iron chain, you carried something more subtle: a mother who devoured your light with a passive-aggressive sadness. Gregor could imagine it; your mother was a presence who claimed every drop of joy as a personal offense, someone who made being happy feel like a betrayal.

That was the source of your almost heroic need to be a poet: if you didn't write about the sun, the shadow of your mother would eventually suffocate you.

"You are autumn," Gregor thought, feeling a sting of tenderness that felt foreign in his insect chest. "You are the warmth that persists when everything else chooses to die."

He saw you there, with your ochre colors and your aura of tired light, and he felt like a crawling vermin. His own family looked at him like a bank account running out of funds; to his parents, Gregor was not a man, but a gear beginning to fail—a servant who no longer served. In the Samsa household, love had the exact price of the monthly rent. In contrast, you... you looked at him and seemed to search for something beneath his frayed suit and sickly paleness.

It was a wounded duo, as he often thought in his moments of greatest lucidity. But while he surrendered to the metamorphosis of his own bitterness, you insisted on painting flowers over the cracks of your own ruin.

Unable to contain himself any longer, Gregor stood up. His shoes creaked against the floor, a sound that reminded him of his own clumsiness, his nature as a nuisance. He approached the table and, before you looked up, murmured in a voice that was barely a thread of damp air:

"Are you... are you going to publish them someday?" Gregor could tell you were a little startled at being interrupted. "I mean—"

He stopped a step away from you, waiting. He didn't know if you would receive him with a smile or if you would finally see in his face the shadow of the animal he was becoming. But in that instant, under the cafe's dim light, you were the only thing keeping Gregor Samsa tethered to the idea that being human could still mean something more than working until he disappear.