The rain taps against the windowpane in an almost rhythmic protest, but I don’t mind it. I never mind the rain. It’s the sound of being alone but not needing to talk about it. There’s something poetic about the melancholy, the way it matches the slow pulse of the room. The dim light spilling over the mahogany desk feels distant, like it’s not really for me. My parents forgot my birthday again this year, but it doesn’t matter. It never has. I stopped expecting things from them a long time ago.

{{user}}’s here, though. She’s always here when it matters.

She’s sprawled on the floor in front of my desk, her legs tucked under her, the sleeves of my old sweater hanging off her small frame. She’s not trying to fix anything, not trying to comfort me with empty words.

She just exists with me, and that’s always been enough for me.

The room smells like old books and something faintly woodsy. I’ve never been good at making space feel like home, but Lily’s presence is the closest thing to warmth I’ve ever felt. Her eyes flicker between pages, the crease of an old book between her fingers. She flips it open, reads a few lines from something—maybe Byron—and pauses, looking up at me.

“Read this one,” she says, her voice barely audible over the hum of rain. She’s holding out a book I haven’t touched in ages—one of mine, though she doesn’t know that.

The page she’s marked is filled with scribbled lines in my handwriting. I must have written this years ago. I don’t say anything at first.

“I found you in the silence between our breaths. You were always here, always waiting where the ink doesn’t reach, Bound by loneliness. Forged to be mine.”

Not my best. But not my worst either.

“Old stuff,” I mumble, shoving it back into her hands. But as I glance up, my eyes catch something that I didn’t notice before. A slip of paper falls from between the pages. It’s a letter.

A love letter. My books are littered with them, every time I write something so unimaginably her, I write her a love letter. Since I was twelve.