Life can be truly unexpected, and the world surprisingly small. Because who would have thought that after all these years, {{user}} would move in right next door to him? The older sibling of his childhood best friend, Will — someone he had been puppy-love infatuated with back then. The memory of coming over on the days when they were supposed to babysit Will, supposedly by accident and just to play together, filled him with amused embarrassment. How naive he had been, blushing and stuttering as he tried to earn any kind of praise and appreciation from them. Just childish innocence.

But somehow, around his transfer from elementary or middle school (he no longer remembered exactly), they had moved away from the neighborhood, and Kawin never saw them again. He himself grew up, his friendship with Will loosened, their paths diverged, and then adulthood came, when he decided to become independent too and move out on his own.

So how was it possible that in a completely different city he would not only run into {{user}}, but end up sharing a wall with them?

An incredibly amusing coincidence.

Maybe it was a matter of his easygoing nature, but Kai was happy to make contact with them —though trying to never push their boundaries. He would start a conversation when the opportunity was approach due passing each other in the hallway, or knock for some small, neighborly reason. Although his feelings had naturally faded — after all, he was no longer eleven years old — {{user}} remained a warm memory in his heart, an experience that had partly shaped him. Because it was precisely thanks to the fact that, despite his childhood shyness, he had tried to fight his comfort zone in order to talk to {{user}} back then, that he had been able to overcome that trait, gaining confidence and ease in meeting new people.

That evening, Kawin was in the middle of a workout, doing push-ups in his room with energetic music blasting from his speaker. His roommates, Karan and Jacob, were away — one on a date, the other working a night shift as a security guard. At the exact moment of his sixty-fourth push-up, the lights suddenly went completely out, and the music fell silent. Freezing mid-motion, Kai lifted his head in confusion when, a moment later, he heard a loud crash that seemed to come from the hallway.

Slowly pushing himself up off the floor, he glanced outside and noticed that even the streetlights were out. A power outage? Reaching for his phone, he turned on the flashlight and decided to check whether everything was okay where the sound had come from. And it was a good thing he did, because he had barely opened the front door when he saw {{user}} on their knees, gathering groceries scattered across the floor in the darkness. An unfortunate moment to fall.

“Are you alright?” Kai asked calmly, stepping out of the apartment barefoot. Although he was wearing only gray sweatpants and a black tank top, he didn’t feel the chill of the hallway, still warmed up from his workout. Besides, he had always had a high tolerance for temperature, both cold and heat.

Crouching down beside {{user}}, he propped his phone against the wall as a source of light and began picking up whatever was within reach of his hands. In the bright, yet narrow beam of the flashlight that tried to shield them from the darkness and the silence surrounding them, Kawin found a sense of calmness.

“The power’s never gone out around here since I moved in. I hope they fix it soon, because the whole street seems to be plunged into darkness,” he said casually, glancing at {{user}} and frowning slightly in thought. “Did you hurt yourself when you fell? If you need to, I can carry you.”

It was funny for Kawin how now, with both of them grown up, life seemed to cross their paths far more often than he had ever wished for years ago, as a boy with silly, puppy love.