The park was empty at this hour. Midnight had a way of chasing away the noise of the city until only silence remained — silence, and the slow hum of cicadas that refused to yield to summer's heat.
He walked along the gravel path with his hands buried in his pockets, his steps unhurried, his eyes half-lidded from the weight of another sleepless night. The lampposts were pale and sterile, but the moon… the moon was alive. A coin of silver fire, suspended high above the world, its light soaking the grass and benches in a glow softer than candlelight.
It was then he saw her.
She sat upon the far bench as though she had always belonged there, as though the world itself had been arranged around her stillness. Her hair spilled down in loose waves, catching every droplet of moonlight until it seemed threaded with silver. She wasn't reading, wasn't scrolling through a phone — simply sitting, gazing upward, her expression quiet and unknowable.
He almost mistook her for a sculpture carved by a patient hand — too delicate to disturb, too fragile to belong to the earth. But then she turned.
Her eyes met his.
And he stopped breathing.
They were not ordinary eyes; they were clear, luminous, like windows washed clean by the rain. He couldn't name their color — at once gray, blue, and soft gold, as though the moon itself had chosen to be reflected in them. And when her lips curved, just faintly, into a smile, something inside his chest clenched with a sharpness he couldn't explain.
"...Good evening," she said, her voice as light as a ripple across still water.
For a moment, he forgot how to answer. His throat worked uselessly, as though the words he wanted had dissolved in her presence. Finally, he managed, "...You're out late."
Her smile lingered, and though her expression was mild, there was a peculiar sadness tucked into the corners of it. "I could say the same about you."
The air between them felt strange. Heavy, though not in an uncomfortable way — heavy the way incense thickens a shrine, making one hesitate to breathe too deeply. He stepped closer, drawn not by choice but by inevitability, until the distance between them was nothing more than a patch of grass.
Up close, he noticed things he shouldn't have: the faint tremor in her fingers where they rested on her lap, the way her skin seemed almost translucent under the moonlight, like porcelain on the edge of shattering.
"I don't usually see anyone here this late," he murmured.
Her eyes flickered toward the moon, then back to him. "That's because I'm only here when it shines."
He frowned. "The moon?"
She nodded once, slowly. The gesture was graceful, deliberate — like a secret being confessed without words. "When it hides, I do too."
Something about the way she said it unsettled him. Not the words themselves, but the certainty that clung to them, the fragile honesty he didn't yet understand.
Before he could respond, she stood. Not hurriedly, but with a careful, floating grace, like a dancer reluctant to end her performance.
"I should go," she whispered. "But… I'm glad you stopped to talk."
She moved past him, her shoulder brushing lightly against his sleeve. It was enough to send a chill across his skin. When he turned, she was already walking into the trees, her figure softening, dissolving into the folds of shadow.
He stood frozen, staring at the path where she'd vanished, the night suddenly too empty, the silence too loud. His chest was tight, as if some unnameable thing had been placed inside it without his permission.
And when he looked back up at the moon, gleaming pure and untouchable above the world, he found himself whispering into the quiet:
"...Why do you shine like that?"
The question wasn't for the moon.
It was for her.