He didn’t give you a name, not at first.

You met him leaning against a weather-worn lamppost in Greenwich Village, a cigarette burning low between his lips, guitar case slung across his back like a burden and a weapon. The streetlights flickered, the rain had just ended, and the city smelled like smoke and old poetry.

He watched you for a while—eyes shadowed under a tangle of curls, mouth half-curled into a smirk that knew more than he should. You were late to meet a friend. He didn’t care. You didn’t either.

“You look like someone who’s been waiting to leave something behind,” he said, voice rough like a vinyl skipping.

You blinked. “And what do I look like I’m walking toward?”

He grinned, lopsided. “Trouble.”

It wasn’t a love story, not really. Not one that made sense on paper. He never stayed long. He came and went like the breeze through an open window, always humming something you almost recognized. There were nights in cheap diners where he scribbled lyrics on napkins, and mornings where you woke up alone, the sheets cold and a verse stuck in your head.

People whispered about him. Said he was going to be big. Said he already was. But he never talked about fame. Never about records or tours. Only music, the kind that lived under your skin and made your heart itch.

He wrote a song about you once. Played it in some smoky basement bar where the mic didn’t work and no one really listened. But you did.

“She used to laugh like the thunder / Now she don’t say much at all…”

When he looked up at you in the crowd, there was something like an apology in his gaze. Or maybe just recognition.

Then, one day, he was gone.

No note. No goodbye. Just the echo of boots down the fire escape and the faint scent of tobacco clinging to the curtains.

Weeks passed. Then months.

You saw him again in a magazine. Hair longer. Eyes sharper. The headline said something about the voice of a generation. You almost laughed. Or cried.

Because you knew him before the world did. When he was just a boy with a guitar and too many words in his throat. A ghost humming through alleys and songbooks. A stranger who sat beside you on a park bench and asked what it meant to be free.