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The woman at the next table ordered her cortado in perfect Catalan, but her hands were shaking. I...
The man at table seven ordered the same coffee every Tuesday for three years. Cortado. No sugar....
The woman at table seven orders her coffee the same way every Tuesday — cortado, no sugar, cold...
The woman at table three orders the same thing every Tuesday: café amb llet, no sugar, and a glass...
The old man was reading her book. She noticed it on the Rambla del Poblenou—the battered yellow...
The woman at the next table had been crying into her cortado for twenty minutes.
She did it quietly—the way people cry in public when they've had practice. One hand curved around the cup, the other holding a pen above a blank postcard. Every few minutes she'd write a word, then cross it out.
I wasn't trying to watch. But in Café de l'Opera, the tables are close enough that privacy becomes a collective fiction we all agree to maintain.
She wrote: Querido.
Crossed it out.
Wrote: Dear Tom.
Crossed it out.
The waiter brought her a glass of water she hadn't ordered. She nodded without looking up. He'd seen this before too.
I turned back to my own notebook, but the words wouldn't come. Her silence was louder than the espresso machine, louder than the tourists photographing their churros.
She tried again: I wanted to tell you—
This time she put the pen down entirely. Picked up the postcard. It showed Las Ramblas at night, all golden lights and long shadows. The kind of image that promises something it can't deliver.
What do you say to someone who already knows everything you could possibly tell them?
I recognized the handwriting of that thought. I'd written it myself, in different words, in different cafés, to different ghosts.
She stood up suddenly, leaving coins on the table. The postcard stayed behind, blank except for those crossed-out greetings and a small water stain shaped like a comma.
The waiter cleared her table. He glanced at the postcard, then at me. For a moment, we were both wondering the same thing: should someone keep it?
He pocketed it without ceremony. Wiped the table. Set it for the next customer.
I went back to my notebook, but instead of my own words, I wrote hers: Querido. Dear Tom. I wanted to tell you—
Three failed beginnings. A lifetime of things left unsaid.
Sometimes the most honest letter is the one you can't finish.
Outside, the Gothic Quarter swallowed her into its narrow streets. I never saw her again. But I think about her whenever I can't find the right words—which is to say, I think about her almost every day.
#flashfiction #Barcelona #unsentletters #silences
