It was raining.
Not the violent kind that lashes against windows or roars down rooftops. This was quieter. Steady. A soft rhythm that blanketed the city in a kind of hushed melancholy. People rushed beneath umbrellas and bus shelters, their heads down, footsteps quick, eager to escape the wet.
Neil didn't move.
He sat alone on the edge of an old wooden bench beneath a half-dead tree, letting the drizzle soak through his hoodie and into his skin. It wasn't like he'd forgotten his umbrella. He just didn't see the point.
The world had felt gray for a long time now. Not because of the sky—but because of everything else. His life had fallen into quiet routine: wake, walk, exist, repeat. Nothing made his heart race anymore. Not art. Not music. Not people.
And then, without warning, she appeared.
Across the park. Through the curtain of rain.
A girl.
She stood barefoot in the grass, rain falling around her like strands of silver thread. Her long black hair clung to her back, her white dress stained dark at the edges. She wasn't running for cover. She wasn't even flinching.
She looked up at the clouds and… smiled.
It wasn't a cheerful smile. It wasn't forced. It was something else entirely—fragile, tired, yet strangely radiant. Like she was smiling not because she was okay… but because she wanted to be.
And for reasons Neil couldn't explain, that smile pierced straight through the fog he'd been drowning in.
He couldn't look away. The world didn't pause, but he felt as though it had.
In that fleeting moment, something inside him whispered:
Remember this.
She turned then, slowly, as if dancing with the wind. No umbrella. No phone. No rush. Just calm steps as she vanished beyond the path of trees lining the edge of the park.
Neil didn't know her name. Didn't know her story.
But something told him he'd just seen the beginning of his own.
And before he even realized it, his fingers moved.
His pencil met the soaked page of his sketchbook for the first time in months.
And he began to draw—
the smile that changed everything.