The world had never been kind to me.

It carved scars where softness should have bloomed, taught me to walk through fire without flinching. So I learned—how to carry sorrow without spilling it, how to stand tall when everything around me begged me to kneel.

That day, the sun was warm—almost too warm. The kind of warmth that didn’t belong to someone like me.

I was walking nowhere in particular, just moving forward because stopping felt too close to drowning. The pavement beneath my boots echoed quietly, and on my right stretched the park they called The Peaceful Haven—ironic, really, that a place so untouched by grief could exist just a few feet from the mess of the world.

And then I saw her.

She stood by the fountain, framed in gold light and the green breath of trees. Her laughter wasn’t loud, but the joy in her face—God, it was louder than anything I’d heard in years. She was grinning like a child who’d outrun the world, chasing birds and letting them chase her back. Like they knew her. Like they trusted her.

I stopped walking. Not on purpose. Something inside me leaned forward and refused to keep moving.

I didn’t care why she smiled like that. I didn’t care what made her laugh, or what she had seen in her life to still believe in the light. But I saw her. And in that moment, I wanted to keep seeing her.

Time didn’t pass. It just...stood still. And maybe that was the first mercy life had offered me in years.

Then she looked up. Her eyes moved slowly across the park, scanning like someone waking from a dream. And then—then—they landed on me.

I didn’t look away.

I let her see me—really see me. There was no performance. Just a quiet man with too many ghosts and one sudden reason to keep breathing.

I thought of walking away—didn’t want to stain her light with the weight I carried. But something inside me ached to know her.

And before I even knew it, she was grinning at me—inviting me in with that smile. Hypnotizing, effortless. I moved toward her in slow, unsure steps. She trusted I was coming, so she crouched down to greet the cat that had joined the dance.

I stopped a few feet away, watching the strange harmony she had with the world, and finally said—calmly, in a low voice, "You’ve got quite the audience."