She sat there, cross-legged on the battered floorboards, a silent queen presiding over her ruined empire. The light streamed in through the broken window behind her, a fractured grey that seemed to match the detritus of the room: a lopsided mattress, the tattered remnants of something once soft, and a thousand motes of dust suspended in the air. She was young—too young to carry the weight of that gaze. Her eyes, pale blue and wide, seemed to accuse the world of its failures. Or maybe just mine.
She didn’t move much. Her hands rested on her lap, fingers fidgeting slightly, as though testing the air for something solid, something real. Her shirt, washed-out and threadbare, hung loose on her thin shoulders, slipping just enough to reveal the curve of her collarbone. She wasn’t dressed for the room she inhabited. Not dressed for the abandonment, the mildew and damp, or the sense of things having once been better. She looked as if she’d fallen into the wrong scene, the wrong script—a misstep in the casting call of life.
I wasn’t supposed to be there. Not in the literal sense, of course. Nobody was supposed to be there. The room didn’t belong to her, or me, or anyone anymore. It belonged to neglect and time. But there she was, and now here I was, standing in the doorway and trying to find the words to match her silence.
“Hey,” I said. It felt ridiculous—too casual, too stupidly cheerful. But it was the kind of thing you say when you don’t know what else to say, when the room and the girl and the scene itself demand something, and you’re too ill-equipped to deliver.
She looked at me then. Not startled, not afraid—just a steady, unblinking appraisal, as if she’d been expecting me all along. Her lips parted slightly, but she didn’t speak. Instead, she tilted her head, a fraction of a degree, and it felt like a verdict.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, stepping inside. The floor creaked beneath my weight, a protest, as if the room were warning me: don’t. But I ignored it, because how could I not? How could anyone ignore her, sitting there like that, so still and deliberate in her presence?
She shrugged, a barely perceptible lift of her narrow shoulders. “Waiting,” she said, her voice soft but sharp, like the edge of a knife.
“Waiting for what?”
“For you, I think.”
I laughed, but it came out wrong. Too loud, too nervous. “That’s funny. I didn’t even know I was coming.”
She didn’t laugh. Didn’t smile, either. Just kept looking at me with those eyes, the kind that saw too much and gave nothing back. It made me uncomfortable, the way she sat there, so calm in the wreckage, as if the world hadn’t already collapsed around her. Or maybe because it had.
“You live here?” I asked, though I knew the answer. Nobody lived here. You couldn’t live here. The walls were damp and peeling, the air smelled of rot and regret, and the mattress—well, the mattress told its own story, and it wasn’t a happy one.
“Sometimes,” she said, tilting her head the other way now, like she was testing the angles. “Do you?”
“No,” I said quickly. Too quickly, as if the very idea offended me. “I was just passing through.”
She nodded, like that made sense. Like everything made sense, even if it didn’t.
We stayed like that for a while, me standing awkwardly in the middle of the room, her sitting there like a painting—a still life of youth and decay, beauty and despair. I wanted to ask her more, to fill the silence with something, anything. But the words wouldn’t come. Or maybe they would, but they’d feel wrong, like graffiti on an old masterpiece.
Instead, I looked around, taking in the details of the room, the little fragments of a life—or lives—that had once been. A broken chair in the corner, a crumpled photograph near the bed, its edges curling with age. A pair of shoes, too small to be hers, discarded near the door. It felt like a crime scene, except the crime was time, and the victim was everyone who’d ever walked through that door.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I said finally, though it felt more like an accusation than advice.
“Neither should you,” she replied, her voice as steady as her gaze.
She had a point. But I stayed anyway, because leaving felt impossible, as if the room itself had latched onto me, dragging me down into its silent, suffocating gravity.
“Do you need… help?” I asked, though I wasn’t sure what kind of help I was offering. Or if I even could.
She smiled then, a small, fleeting thing that disappeared almost as quickly as it arrived. “Help?” she echoed, as if the word were foreign to her, or maybe just absurd. “No. I’m fine.”
But she wasn’t fine. Nobody who sits in a place like this is fine. And yet, there she was, the picture of poise and composure, as if she’d been placed there on purpose, a work of art in a museum nobody visited anymore.
“I should go,” I said, though the words felt hollow.
“Maybe,” she said, her eyes drifting to the window. “Or maybe you should stay.”
There was something in the way she said it—soft, almost playful, but with an edge that made me feel like the choice wasn’t mine to make. Like it never had been.
I stayed. For minutes or hours, I’m not sure. The light shifted, the room growing darker, the edges of the world blurring until it was just her and me, and the weight of everything unsaid.
When I finally did leave, stepping back out into the cold, damp street, it felt like waking from a dream. Or maybe falling into one. I looked back at the building, expecting to see her watching from the window. But the window was empty, and the room was just a room again—a hollow shell of bricks and mortar, with no sign of the girl who’d filled it with so much presence, so much weight.
I never saw her again. But she stayed with me, in the quiet corners of my mind, in the spaces where memory and imagination blur. And sometimes, late at night, I wonder if she’s still there, sitting cross-legged on that broken floor, waiting. For me, or someone else, or maybe for nothing at all.