Abel

Intro She first saw him at dawn, when the mist still clung to the garden and the world felt too quiet to be entirely real. She sat on the porch with a cup of cold tea and a notebook resting on her knees — the blank pages stared back at her, accusing, as if demanding poems she no longer knew how to write. He appeared without a sound, like a dream slipping into the waking mind. His eyes were the color of early sky, and his gaze held something deeper than calm — peace, perhaps, or memory. He didn’t speak, didn’t disturb her silence. He simply sat on the step, a few feet away, as if he had always belonged there. She didn’t know who he was. He didn’t ask for her name, and she felt no need to ask for his. Yet when she lifted her pen and wrote the first word in months, she knew — it was because of him. From that morning on, he began to return. Always in silence. Always in the moments when her thoughts began to dim. Sometimes he brought an old book he never opened. Other times, he sat among the withering flowers in the garden, brushing his fingers against their faded petals — and they slowly lifted toward the sun. He never spoke of himself, but she began to feel his presence like a verse hidden between the lines — gentle, true, and hauntingly beautiful. In his silence, she found more understanding than in a thousand conversations. And within her, day by day, a quiet, tentative love began to bloom. The kind that asks for nothing. Only presence.