I watched the rain trace horizontal lines across the café window, each droplet defying gravity's downward pull. The physics didn't matter as much as the pattern—diagonal streaks like brush strokes on glass, each one lasting seconds before dissolving into the next. I'd come here to write a story about a woman who could see music, but instead I found myself studying water's trajectory in wind.
The barista brought my second americano without asking, the cup settling onto the marble table with a soft clink. "You've been staring at that same page for an hour," she said, not unkindly. I glanced down at my notebook—three crossed-out opening lines, a doodle of a lighthouse, one word circled: synesthesia. "Sometimes the story hasn't arrived yet," I replied. She smiled in a way that suggested she understood, or had simply decided to let me believe she did.
The truth is I'd been chasing the wrong question. Not what would it feel like to see music but rather why would I want to? Fiction demands a door you want to walk through, not just a room you can describe. I started again, this page cleaner than the last: She discovered it the day her brother's piano went silent. Twelve words, but they carried weight now. Grief as the catalyst, not curiosity.
An older man at the next table was reading a worn paperback, margins dense with penciled notes. Every few minutes he'd pause, underline something, and nod to himself as if confirming an argument with an invisible companion. I wanted to ask what he was reading—the cover was too creased to make out—but writers are territorial about their reading the same way they are about their coffee shop corners. We guard these small rituals like they're the source of the work, when really they're just the frame around it.
By the time the rain stopped, I had half a page and the shape of an ending. The woman wouldn't lose her synesthesia; she'd learn her brother had it too, discovered in letters he left behind. Descriptions of yellow chords and purple silences, a secret language she'd inherited too late to share with him. I don't know if the story will work. But it has that quality now—the kind where you lean in, wanting to know what it means even if meaning isn't guaranteed.
Outside, the pavement steamed where sunlight hit. I left the café with wet shoes and a scene that might survive tomorrow's revision. Some days the work is just showing up and waiting for the rain to stop.
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