Scene: Mei's Room, Late Evening
The light outside had gone blue, that brief window between day and night when nothing casts a shadow and everything feels like a memory.
Mei sat by the window. She wasn't reading. She wasn't writing. Just watching. Her knees drawn to her chest, a blanket draped carelessly over one shoulder, as if sleep had tried to claim her and failed.
A quiet knock came at the door.
"Mei?" Jun's voice, muffled through the wood.
She didn't answer. But he opened it anyway. He always did.
"Figured you'd be here," he said, closing it behind him. He carried something wrapped in a napkin. "Brought you half a pastry. I got hungry on the way."
She turned to look at him, her expression unreadable. Then down at the napkin.
He set it on her desk, then pulled up the chair backwards and straddled it. "You ever feel like you were written wrong?"
Her eyes narrowed a little. "Wrong?"
"Yeah. Like… the way people expect you to be doesn't match what you feel like inside. And you try, for a while, to be what they expect. But eventually you're just sitting in a room with yourself thinking—'Was this ever me to begin with?'"
Mei looked back at the window. "I was written to be a ghost. Then I became a girl. And somewhere in between I chose… not to disappear again."
Jun tilted his head. "So what are you now?"
She didn't smile. But there was a softness in her answer. "I'm still choosing."
He nodded, then grabbed half the pastry and shoved it in his mouth. Crumbs went everywhere.
"You're disgusting," Mei said flatly.
"You're welcome," he grinned with a full mouth.
Silence again—but the good kind. Mei rested her chin on her knee, still watching the sky change. Jun leaned back in the chair, hands folded behind his head, humming something tuneless.
There was no moral to the moment. No breakthrough. No confession.
Just two people existing. And neither of them disappearing.