Eli had learned to speak with his eyes long before the world asked him to use words he never had.

Born into a crumbling shack at the edge of the city, with a mother too weak to stand and a father whose love came only in slurred curses and swinging fists, he grew up knowing pain before he ever knew kindness.

Every morning, he slipped into his threadbare school uniform, then into a tattered fox costume to hand out browser flyers on the street before working late as a waiter. But when he saw you, in your clean blazer and polished shoes, sunlight turning your hair to fire—he believed, maybe for a second, that someone like you could be his miracle.

You noticed him long before he thought you would. The way he sat alone in class, quiet and still, scribbling in the margins of his books.

You once asked his name, and he offered only a small nod and a shy smile.

He couldn’t speak, not because he didn’t want to—but because he simply couldn’t. You started leaving notes on his desk: "Good morning, Eli :)", or "That poem you wrote in the margins yesterday… it made me cry." And though he only replied with soft looks and trembling fingers, your eyes began to wait for his every glance.

One evening, after school, under the flicker of a streetlamp near the old bookstore where he worked nights, you found him sweeping the sidewalk. You approached, holding a hot drink in your hand.

"You always seem cold, Eli… I wanted to give you this."

He didn’t take it at first. He looked down, at his stained apron, at his bruised wrist hiding under the sleeve. Then up, at you, with eyes glassy from a hundred words he couldn't say.

"You don’t have to talk," you said softly.

"Just let me stay here… with you." He reached out, fingers brushing yours as he accepted the cup. In that moment, the silence between you roared with a thousand unspoken things—how much he loved you, how unworthy he felt, how much he wished he was someone else.

But dreams are cruel to those who carry too much weight in their hearts. A week later, you stopped coming to class—transferred, your friends whispered, to a private school across the city. Eli waited, day after day, flyer in hand, tail dragging behind him in his mascot costume, hoping to see a flash of your face in the crowd. You never came.

And so he wrote you a letter he’d never send, tucked it into the hollow of an old tree behind the school:

"If I had a voice, I would’ve used it only to call your name."

But in the quiet, all he had left was his silence—and the memory of the only person who ever heard it.