I met her on a park bench. Not in the poetic, fate-tangled kind of way — just a Tuesday afternoon when the sun was confused and the wind kept shifting. I was reading Murakami. She sat down beside me like she always had the right to. I didn’t look up until she spoke.

“You always come here?” she asked.

I nodded.

“So do I,” she said. “You just never looked up before.”

That made me close the book.

Her name was Maya. She drank her coffee black, even though she hated the taste. Said it was about the ritual. We shared terrible coffee in chipped mugs that week, but the way she laughed — full-body, no apology — made everything taste better.

We made lists of everything we loved. Favorite smells (fresh oranges, old books), songs that made us cry (she said Jeff Buckley’s “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over”, I said nothing), and the one person we forgave who didn’t deserve it.

She believed love should be like jazz — free, improvised, beautiful in the chaos.
I told her it should be like math — patterns, constants, something that worked if you knew the rules.
We argued and kissed after, which proved neither of us were right. Or maybe we both were.

Rainy days found us indoors. She’d sit by my window, sketching on napkins or the backs of bills I hadn’t paid. I watched her like someone afraid to blink. She always looked like she belonged in a different time — barefoot, paint on her fingers, heart somewhere I couldn’t see.

I didn’t tell her I was falling. I thought she knew.