ROOFTOP AFFAIR

You meet this girl at a hostel rooftop party where the city lights blur into watercolor against the midnight sky. She's standing alone, watching the skyline like it owes her an explanation.

You don't approach her immediately. Instead, you watch her watch the city, the way her fingers trace the railing, the way her shoulders rise and fall with each breath, as if she's learning to breathe in a place that doesn't feel like home.

When you finally speak, it's not a line. It's a question: "What are you looking for out there?"She turns. Her eyes are the color of someone who has loved too many times and learned nothing from it. She smiles; not at you, but at the question itself.

"A reason to stay," she says. That night, you don't sleep. You talk until the city wakes up, until the rooftop becomes ordinary again in the morning light.

She tells you about a man who promised her the world and delivered only postcards. She tells you about another who built a life with her, brick by brick, only to realize halfway through that he was constructing a prison, not a home. She tells you about the spaces between people, how they grow wider the more you try to close them.

You listen. Not because you're kind, but because you recognize something in her story. The same fragility. The same armor. The same beautiful, terrible capacity to love despite knowing exactly how it will end. Days pass. Then weeks.

You become the person she calls when the city feels too loud, when memories ambush her in grocery stores or coffee shops. You become the person she doesn't have to explain herself to. And somewhere in that becoming, you realize you've made a mistake.You've let her believe that you're different.

The truth is, you're not. You're just better at hiding it. You're better at the performance of being present while keeping the essential parts of yourself locked away. You're better at making someone feel seen while remaining invisible. And that's perhaps the cruelest thing you can do to someone who has already learned that love is a con game played by people who should know better.

One evening, she asks you directly: "Are you going to leave?" You don't answer immediately. You're thinking about honesty, about how it's supposed to be a virtue but often feels like a weapon. You're thinking about how the kindest thing you could do is lie, but you've already lied so much that the truth feels like the only currency you have left.

"Yes," you say finally. "But not today."She nods. She's already grieving you, you realize. She's already written the ending in her head, already prepared the eulogy for whatever this is. She's learned that anticipating pain is sometimes easier than experiencing it. So she holds you closer, not because she believes you'll stay, but because she's practicing the art of letting go.

When you do leave, and you will, because people like you always do, she won't be surprised. She'll be sad, yes. She'll replay conversations, searching for the moment she should have walked away. 

She'll wonder if she loved you or just loved the idea of being loved. But she won't be surprised. Because she saw it coming from that first night on the rooftop, when you asked what she was looking for and she told you the truth: a reason to stay. 

And you, in your way, gave her one. Not a reason that would last, but a reason nonetheless. A reason that felt like home for a moment, before revealing itself as just another temporary shelter in a life of temporary shelters. 

And that, perhaps, is what it means to witness someone. Not to save them. Not to complete them. But to see them clearly, to see their capacity for hope and their certainty of heartbreak existing in the same breath, and to love them anyway, knowing that love is not always enough.

You meet this girl at a rooftop party. You don't know yet that you'll become the story she tells to the next person who asks what she's looking for. You don't know that you'll become a cautionary tale, a lesson learned, a name she'll stop saying out loud because it hurts less that way. 

But maybe that's the real witnessing. Not the grand gestures or the promises made in the dark. But the quiet recognition that we are all both the betrayer and the betrayed, the one who leaves and the one left behind. That love is not a destination but a series of small deaths we choose to experience, hoping that one day, someone will choose to stay through them.

You meet this girl at a rooftop party. And in witnessing her, you witness yourself. And in that mirror, you see everything you're running from and everything you'll never stop running toward.