The morning was just as unkind as the night before. Alina woke with the heavy weight of her mother's words still pressing against her chest, a phantom ache from a dream that felt more real than her waking life. Open it on your twenty-fifth birthday. It will guide you. The words echoed in the silence of her room. Her 25th birthday. It was supposed to mean something. It was supposed to be special, wasn't it? But as she lay there staring at the cracked ceiling, a faint spiderweb of fissures branching out from the light fixture, she knew better.
Birthdays had lost their magic long ago, the light snuffed out the year her mother died. Now they were just markers of time, empty milestones that highlighted how little had changed.
Hope, she decided, was a dangerous thing. It was an ember that could easily flare into a wildfire of disappointment. With a sigh that felt like it came from the deepest part of her soul, she shoved the old wooden box aside on her nightstand. The ring, still nestled inside its velvet pouch, remained untouched. She couldn't bring herself to even look at it. To put it on would be to admit she believed in fairy tales, and her life was proof that they didn't exist. She had more pressing matters—the mundane, relentless kind that made life feel impossibly small. Work, deadlines, paying rent, existing.
Dragging herself out of bed, she dressed in the same dull office attire—gray slacks, a crisp white blouse. Her reflection in the mirror was unremarkable, a portrait of anonymity. The same tired hazel eyes, the same bland expression, the same woman who blended into the background of the world. Nothing about her had changed. The girl in the mirror was not a princess, and she certainly wasn't waiting for a magical guide. She was just Alina, and that was that.
Outside, the city streets bustled with the early morning rush, a river of strangers flowing toward their destinations. Alina pushed through the crowds, her shoulder bumping against others without apology or acknowledgment, her thoughts drifting in and out, half-lost in an anxious haze. She could already predict how the day would unfold with painful accuracy—no birthday wishes on the company chat, no friendly cupcake left on her desk, no surprises. Just another ordinary, invisible day.
She was so lost in her own bleak forecast that she barely noticed the old pretzel vendor across the street waving her down.
"Hey, Gray!" the man called, his voice gruff but warm, cutting through the city's cacophony. He was a fixture in the neighborhood, a stout man named Sal with a flour-dusted apron and kind, crinkling eyes. He was stationed at the corner every morning with his cart of golden, salt-flecked pretzels. "Happy birthday, kid."
Alina blinked, momentarily thrown. The flow of pedestrians parted around her as she stood frozen on the pavement. Someone remembered?
She hesitated, then dodged a bicycle courier before crossing the street. "How did you—"
Sal chuckled, his belly shaking as he handed her a fresh pretzel wrapped in brown paper. The warmth seeped through the paper into her cold hands. "You think I don't pay attention? You buy from me twice a week, always the same order, always the same lost-in-thought expression. Today's different." He gestured with his tongs toward the morning crowd. "People are so damn busy with their own lives, they don't notice things. They look, but they don't see. But I do."
Alina swallowed the sudden lump in her throat, the unexpected kindness feeling both wonderful and excruciating. "Thanks, Sal," she murmured, clutching the warm pretzel like it was some kind of lifeline.
"Have a good one, Gray." And just like that, he turned back to his cart, twisting a fresh piece of dough, back to the rhythm of his day, as if the moment hadn't meant anything.
But to Alina, it had. It was a single, tiny spark in an overwhelming darkness.
Work was as relentless as she had predicted. The spark from Sal's kindness was quickly extinguished by the sterile, air-conditioned chill of the office. She barely had a moment to breathe between compiling reports for the Henderson account and an endless flood of emails, each one marked with a red flag of urgency. And no one—not a single person—acknowledged her birthday.
She overheard conversations about upcoming weddings, promotions, and weekend trips to the coast. She was a shadow, moving between cubicles to drop off files, drowning in paperwork while life happened all around her, to everyone but her.
Even worse, he looked particularly breathtaking today.
Logan Hayes, her silent, hopeless office crush—the one man who made the dull fluorescent lights feel like they held some kind of warmth. He was standing near the break room, coffee in hand, laughing with Jessica from Marketing. His voice was a smooth, confident baritone, his dark hair was tousled just the right amount, and his sharp jawline caught the light in a way that seemed profoundly unfair. He moved with an easy grace, a man entirely comfortable in his own skin, in his own world.
Alina swallowed hard, her heart doing a painful little flip as she took in the effortless charisma he exuded. And then she looked at herself—her sensible shoes, her boring slacks, the way she instinctively tried to make herself smaller.
She was plain. Forgettable. Unworthy.
What would someone like Logan, someone who shone so brightly, ever see in her? Nothing. That was the answer. He probably didn't even know her name. And maybe that was why today felt particularly cruel—it wasn't just a birthday, it was a stark reminder that life didn't hand her dreams wrapped in pretty bows. It didn't even acknowledge she was in the room.
She spent the rest of the day in quiet misery, her focus shot, staring at the clock on her computer screen, waiting for the hours to drag her away from this unforgiving cycle.
By the time she arrived home, a deep, cellular exhaustion had seeped into her bones like poison. She dropped her bag near the door and let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding all day, her shoulders slumping in defeat.
Happy birthday, Alina.
She hadn't spoken the words out loud. Just whispered them internally, a ghost of a thought, just to see if they felt real. They didn't.
She wandered into the kitchen, the pretzel from Sal sitting uneaten on the counter, a sad relic of a morning that had promised a brief moment of light. She poured herself a glass of cheap red wine—something stronger than coffee but not quite the kind of liquor that would make her forget the day entirely. She wished she could forget, though. She wished she could erase the memory of Logan's easy smile and the crushing weight of her own invisibility.
Sinking onto the couch, she stared at the city lights blinking beyond her window, a galaxy of lives she would never be a part of. Was this all life was? Was this what birthdays felt like after childhood—just another reminder of how little anyone cared, of how profoundly alone you were?
She didn't cry. She was long past that. Tears felt like a waste of energy.
But something inside her cracked, just a little. A fissure in the carefully constructed wall of apathy she had built around her heart.
A shadow of longing. A desperate, primal need for something more. More than this. More than her.
Her gaze flickered toward the wooden box sitting on the shelf, its dark wood seeming to absorb the dim light of the room.
The ring. The promise. The one thing she hadn't paid attention to all day.
A flicker of curiosity stirred within her, but it was quickly smothered by the heavy blanket of her exhaustion. Not yet. Not tonight.
She didn't have the energy to entertain fantasies. Tonight was for embracing the cold, hard truth of her reality. And tomorrow, she would wake up and do it all over again.