noen

THE OBSERVER.

We are sitting in our usual corner of the coffee shop, the air thick with the scent of roasted beans and the animated static of our voices. We’ve just come from the theater, and we are mid-spiral—deconstructing character arcs, debating the hidden motives of the protagonist, throwing out theories with the kind of reckless passion only friends have.

Just outside the glass, there is an observer. He stands in the blur of the sidewalk, watching us from a cold, third-person perspective. He is a ghost in the machinery of our afternoon. For a fleeting second, his eyes catch ours through the window. He tugs at the corner of his mouth, a ghost of a smile appearing as if he’s remembering a dream he once had. “I used to do this, too,” he seems to whisper to the glass, a quiet acknowledgement of a shared history. Then, he adjusts his coat and walks off into the crowd. We don't notice him leaving. We are too busy living.

Then, the years begin to bleed into one another. The town remains a stubborn monument to the past, though the edges have frayed. The coffee shop is still there, its neon sign humming the same low tune, but the atmosphere has shifted. The table where we once sat is now a hollow space—a quiet vacuum in a loud room. The observer returns.

His silhouette is sharper now, etched by the weight of time. He looks through the same glass, but the reflection he sees is fractured. My friends have long since ascended into the lives they promised themselves. One is a surgeon in a distant city, his hands saving lives; another is a titan of industry, navigating boardrooms; the third is on a screen somewhere, finally the actor he said he’d be. And then there is me. I am sitting at that empty table, a solitary figure trapped in the amber of "what if." I am the only one who stayed. I am a statue of indecision, completely lost in a map I forgot how to read.

The observer doesn’t smile this time. He leans against the cold brick, his eyes fixed on me through the window, his mind a relentless engine of interrogation. “What went wrong?” he asks the silence. “How did the boy with the vision become the man who went nowhere?” He watches me sit there, frozen in the same spot where the theories were once loud, wondering at what point the observation ended and the disappearance began.