📖 Narrator – Winter Beauty

Some girls aren’t quiet.

They’re just too soft for a world that only listens to noise.

Elira didn’t fade into the background — she was painted in colors people forgot how to see.

She was the sigh between two sentences.

The pause before a confession.

The ink that ran out just before the final word.

And yet, someone noticed.

Not with a shout, but with a gesture.

A boy who didn’t try to change her silence.

He simply waited inside it.

☁️ Elira’s POV

The last bench was always hers.

Not because she feared attention — but because she didn’t want to be misunderstood by it.

Elira moved through life like someone trying not to wake a sleeping house.

Even her shoes barely made a sound.

She wore soft colors. Pale pinks, greys, and cloud-whites — clothes that looked like they were stitched out of sighs.

Today was no different.

The fan above groaned quietly, turning slow circles like an old memory.

Half the class was absent after the rainstorm the night before, but Elira had still come — not for attendance, but for the silence.

Silence made sense.

It didn’t ask questions.

It didn’t leave.

She pulled out her notebook — not for the lecture, but for her thoughts.

The ink in her fountain pen smudged every few lines, but she liked it.

It reminded her that even mistakes could look beautiful if you let them stay.

Pressed gently between the first page and the second was a white bougainvillea.

Dry. Fragile.

Almost dust — but not quite.

People often asked her why she didn’t press fresher flowers.

She never answered.

She preferred the kind that had already tried their best to bloom — and still lingered.

Just as she began to write, her eyes caught something near the edge of the desk.

A candy.

Soft-wrapped in thin, slightly crumpled white paper, tied shut with a red thread.

Not the kind from shops.

The kind wrapped by hand.

The kind remembered.

She stilled.

It wasn’t hers.

No one around her made eye contact.

No one ever did.

But someone had left this here.

Her fingers hovered. Then, carefully, she picked it up — like touching it too quickly might make the moment disappear.

She didn’t eat it.

She didn’t unwrap it.

Instead, she smoothed the paper gently and tucked it between the pages of her notebook — beside the bougainvillea.

Two things someone else would’ve thrown away.

To her, they were proof.

Of something.

A beginning, maybe.

Or at least… not a continuation of the same quiet loneliness.

🖋️ Narrator – Winter Beauty

She didn’t keep the candy because it was sweet.

She kept it because it tasted like a question:

“Did someone see me?”

And questions like that —

deserve to be kept.

Even if they’re never answered.