It happened on a Tuesday, or maybe it was a Thursday. The kind of day that slips between the cracks of memory, not for lack of importance, but because it arrived quietly. We were sitting across from each other, coffee cooling in porcelain cups, the conversation meandering through the usual detours until it landed on something unexpected.

“Have you ever lived alone?” you asked.

Not in the way people usually mean it — not about rent or roommates or the silence of an empty apartment. You were asking something else. I could tell by the way your eyes didn’t blink, by the way the question lingered in the air like perfume.

“Yes,” I said.

You tilted your head, curious. “Where?”

And I told you the truth.

“In some love stories.”

You didn’t laugh. You didn’t scoff. You just nodded, as if you understood — as if you, too, had unpacked your heart in places where no one stayed long enough to help arrange the furniture.

Because living alone isn’t always about solitude. Sometimes it’s about presence — yours, theirs, and the absence that follows. I’ve lived alone in the chapters where someone loved me but not enough. In the verses where I waited for a call that never came. In the scenes where I was the only one who remembered the way the light hit their face.

Love stories are strange homes. They have windows that look out on what might have been, and doors that never quite close. You live there with ghosts — not the scary kind, but the ones that wear your favorite sweater and hum your favorite song.

So yes, I’ve lived alone. Not in cities or studios, but in stories. And some of them were beautiful. Some of them were brutal. But all of them were mine. ❤️

©️ Beatriz Esmer