Helena looked at the bedroom ceiling for the third time that morning. The damp stain in the left corner seemed larger than last week, or maybe it was just her imagination. Maybe it was just another thing she pretended not to see.
The alarm clock rang at seven, as always. She pressed the button with the same tired hand as always, dragged her feet to the bathroom, brushed her teeth looking in the mirror without really seeing herself. Almost forty years. When did it happen? When did she stop recognizing herself?
The coffee was cold when she reached the kitchen. She had forgotten to turn off the coffee maker the night before—again. She drank it anyway, standing, looking out the window at the gray street below. Cars. Hurried people. Everyone going somewhere, as if they knew exactly where they needed to be.
She didn't know.
At work, Marina was already at the next desk, frantically typing some last-minute report.
"Good morning, Hel. Did you see Rodrigo's email?" — she asked without lifting her eyes from the screen.
— I saw it.
Lie. She hadn't seen it. But what was the difference? It would be just another urgent task, another meeting that led nowhere, another day identical to the previous one.
She turned on the computer and felt that familiar weight in her chest. It wasn't sadness, exactly. It was something worse: it was absence. As if she were watching her own life from afar, unable to truly inhabit it.
The phone vibrated. A message from André.
"I need to pick up my things at your house. Is Saturday okay?"
Helena read it twice before replying with a simple "Ok". Three years of relationship reduced to a logistical negotiation. He would take the pots and pans his mother had given him, she would keep the books they had never read together. Simple as that.
It didn't hurt anymore. And that, somehow, was what hurt the most.
At lunchtime, she sat alone in the park across from the office. She ate a tasteless sandwich while watching a mother running after a small child. The girl laughed, free, completely present in that moment. Helena couldn't remember the last time she had felt like this—whole, awake, truly alive.
"Excuse me, is this bench occupied?"
She looked up, ready to say no, that he could sit down. But the words wouldn't come out.
The man in front of her was... different. Tall, broad shoulders, dark hair slightly disheveled. But it wasn't his appearance that caught her off guard. It was the way he looked at her. As if he knew her. As if he truly saw her.
"No, you can sit down," she managed to say, quickly looking away.
He sat down, but didn't take his eyes off her. Helena felt her skin tingle, a strange feeling of familiarity, as if that moment had happened before, somewhere she couldn't remember.
"Do you come here often?" he asked, and there was something in his voice. Something warm. Something that made her look again.
"Sometimes."
"Me too."
Silence. But it wasn't an uncomfortable silence. It was heavy, dense, full of something Helena couldn't name.
"I'm Liam."
"Helena."
When their hands touched in greeting, it was as if an electric current ran through her entire body. He held her hand for a second longer than would be normal, and Helena was absolutely certain of one thing: nothing in her life would be automatic again.
That man, whoever he was, had just woken her up.
And she had no idea if that was a blessing or a curse.
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to be continued...