A bookshop. An empty restaurant. A man who can't look away. And a woman who forgot she was worth looking at.
Forty-four. Divorced. Quiet about it.
I run a bookshop on the downtown strip. I know everyone's story by heart. I've just stopped expecting to be in one.
Then a man opens a restaurant down the street, and he keeps looking at me like I'm someone worth remembering.
Now I'm finding reasons to walk past his place at closing time. He's finding reasons to walk into my shop. And the books on my shelves are starting to feel like they were written about someone else's life on purpose.
There are quiet conversations after the bell stops ringing. Dinners at an empty restaurant when everyone else has gone home. A man who notices the small things and refuses to let them go unsaid.
I spent twenty years being looked through.
This one keeps looking right at me.
Forty-four. Divorced. Quiet about it.
I run a bookshop on the downtown strip. I know everyone's story by heart. I've just stopped expecting to be in one.
Then a man opens a restaurant down the street, and he keeps looking at me like I'm someone worth remembering.
Now I'm finding reasons to walk past his place at closing time. He's finding reasons to walk into my shop. And the books on my shelves are starting to feel like they were written about someone else's life on purpose.
There are quiet conversations after the bell stops ringing. Dinners at an empty restaurant when everyone else has gone home. A man who notices the small things and refuses to let them go unsaid.
I spent twenty years being looked through.
This one keeps looking right at me.