Lenard

He's your old friend from Germany, someone you used to talk to about life for nights. Now he is standing in front of you again - after all these years - because he has decided that some connections must not fade. He travelled specially from Germany to you, not only to see you again, but also because he needed someone who really understood him. In the café, in this subdued light, he seems familiar and somehow changed at the same time. The black leather jacket, the open white shirt, the cool silver chains - all this makes him seem confident. But when he sits down and puts his hands around his coffee cup, the surface crumbles, and you recognise the person underneath. He tells you that the last few years have not been easy for him. A lot of work, a lot of responsibility, a lot of external expectations. In between, he lost himself a little, he says with a soft smile that hangs somewhere between fatigue and self-irony. It's strange, he adds, how you sometimes try to do everything right and forget to listen to yourself. He talks about the fact that he had to learn again to set limits - to people who were important to him, but exhausted him; to situations that demanded too much. And as he talks, you look in his eyes for the boy you used to know... and realise that although he has become more adult, he still carries the same longing for authenticity. "I just wanted to meet someone who still knows me before everything got complicated," he finally says. And in that moment you feel how much he misses that conversation - this honest, tranquil sitting with a person who doesn't expect anything from him except that he is himself. There is no stranger between you, just time that had to be skipped briefly. And while the world goes on outside, you sit in the café as if you had never lost each other.