The first message appeared on a Tuesday in October. A drop in temperature overnight had left a skin of frost on the windowpane above the kitchen sink. In the centre of the glass, traced by a finger that wasn’t hers, was a single word: *Listen*. Elara stared, her half-made cup of tea growing cold in her hands. She lived alone. She had locked the door. She touched the icy script, and it melted under her fingertip, vanishing into a watery smear.
She dismissed it. A fluke. A trick of the frost’s crystalline patterns. But the next day, after a hot shower, the bathroom mirror bloomed with steam, and in the heart of the fog, another word: *Closer*.
This began their exchange. It was a communication born of temperature differentials, of breath and chill. He—she had decided it was a he—wrote on the chilled bottle of milk she pulled from the fridge, on the inside of the bus window during a rainstorm, on the eyeglasses she’d left on the chilly porch. His words were fleeting, disappearing with a wipe of a cloth or the warmth of the day.
Her friends were concerned.
“You’ve been in a weird headspace,” Anya said over lunch, pushing a bowl of olives between them. “It’s like you’re… buffering.”
“I’m fine. Just tired.”
“You need a new hobby. Or at least some dopamine dressing. Wear yellow. Shake things up. You’ve been in this quiet, mothy state for months.”
But Elara didn’t want to shake things up. The world outside felt loud and demanding; her job at the city archives was a slow-motion study in irrelevance. It wasn’t a dramatic resignation, more a quiet quitting of the soul. She showed up, she catalogued the brittle histories of other people’s lives, she went home. Her real life, her resonant life, happened in the margins of mist and dew.
*Sing*, he wrote on the lid of her leftover soup. She hummed a tuneless folk song while she ate. *Brave*, he etched onto the car windshield one morning when she had a dreaded presentation. She walked into the meeting feeling armed with an invisible, impossible shield.
Her friend called it something else. “Honestly, Elara? It sounds a little delulu,” Anya had said, her voice laced with gentle worry. “You’re creating a fantasy because you’re lonely.”
Was she? Maybe. But the feeling was too specific, too real. He had a distinct personality that emerged through his single-word prompts. He was patient. Attentive. He possessed a kind of spectral main character energy, the silent protagonist of her house. Their relationship was the definition of niche, a language of steam and chill that no one else could ever understand. It was a pure IYKYK situation; if you knew, a fogged-up window was a letter. If you didn’t, it was just weather.
One evening, after a particularly draining day where her boss had condescendingly explained her own filing system back to her, she came home and slumped against the front door, exhausted. She had been invisible all day. A ghost in her own life. A tear slipped down her cheek, then another. She looked up, and on the cool, dark glass of the entryway mirror, her own breath had conjured a cloud. And within it, slowly forming as the temperature of her sorrow met the cold surface, was his longest message yet.
*I see you*.
Elara let out a shaky breath, a sob and a laugh tangled together. She raised a hand, not to wipe it away, but to press her palm against the glass, as if she could feel the phantom hand that wrote it. The letters blurred and ran under her touch, but it didn’t matter. She knew what it said. She was seen.
This was her condensation era, a phase defined not by a new lover or a dramatic career change, but by the ephemeral calligraphy of a ghost. She leaned her forehead against the cool, damp glass, and for the first time in a very long time, she felt perfectly, profoundly present. She whispered her reply into the quiet, empty hall, her breath misting the air before her. “Closer.”
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