A week had passed. Seven mornings, seven empty benches. I stopped expecting. But I kept arriving.
Not because I believed she'd return, but because absence, once it becomes routine, feels almost like presence.
Today, the wind was restless. It played with leaves and bits of paper, tossing them like memories that didn't know where to land.
I was packing up, ready to leave — when I saw it. A corner of paper, caught between the slats of the bench. Faded, crumpled, but not yet gone. I pulled it out carefully. The kind of careful you use with something sacred.
It was a page from a notebook. Torn. On it, only a few words — barely legible, as if written in a rush.
"Sometimes I sit here just to be found.But no one ever looks."
That was all. No name. No signature. No date. Just that one sentence and a faint, half-erased doodle in the margin. A leaf. Falling.
My breath caught.
I'd drawn that once, the exact same shape, beside her shoulder. Was it hers?
I couldn't know for sure. But my heart answered before logic could.
Yes. It was.
She left something. Maybe not for me. Maybe not for anyone. But it stayed.
And now I held it.
I walked home with the paper tucked inside my sketchbook. Not pressed flat — I didn't want to erase the folds. They were part of the story now.
And later, when the night settled over the city, I opened my sketchbook again, and wrote under her last sketch:
"She wanted to be found."
Not saved. Not loved. Just… found.