The Longing of Dreams

The building had no business existing.

From the street it looked like a monolith carved out of the night itself, black glass swallowing every reflection the city offered. Its silhouette rose in impossible geometry, a long rectangle that softened into a curved point near the top, as though someone had begun drawing a triangle and, halfway through, changed their mind. Low clouds drifted around its highest floors, hiding its peak whenever the wind carried the mist just right.

Everything beyond it disappeared into shades of gray.

Not the gray of lifelessness, but the gray that comes before rain, before a confession, before something changes forever.

The city glowed beneath it in bruises of blue and violet.

I had come to stay with an old friend for a few months. Maybe she was family. Maybe we had simply known each other long enough that the distinction no longer mattered.

She lived at the very top of the building.

Before we went upstairs, we met at the restaurant nestled into one of its upper floors, where living branches reached across the ceiling beside carefully sculpted trees, real leaves tangled with artificial ones until no one could tell where nature ended and design began. Warm light pooled over polished wood, never bright enough to erase the evening outside.

The air smelled like rain through an open window.

We sat together around a circular booth hidden behind green walls of leaves. We laughed over dinner, speaking lazily about work, travel, plans for the months ahead. She was brilliant in the effortless way successful people sometimes are, carrying herself with quiet certainty. Her husband matched her calm, though every now and then his attention lingered on me a heartbeat longer than it should have.

“You look beautiful tonight,” he said once.

It wasn’t dramatic.

It wasn’t loud.

Just enough to settle somewhere beneath my ribs.

She didn’t seem to notice.

When dinner ended, we rode the private elevator to the penthouse.

The apartment felt less like a home than a place imagined by someone who had never compromised. Black stone, pale marble, thin veins of gold catching the light. Wide windows stretched from floor to ceiling until the city seemed to pour directly inside.

The terrace stole my breath.

A long pool reflected the clouds above like polished steel. Beside it stood a simple gray wall beneath a matching roof, where water spilled continuously in a soft curtain. Not a waterfall. Not a fountain.

Just an endless shower.

Its quiet rhythm dissolved into the rain beyond the balcony until it became impossible to tell which sound belonged to the sky.

I remember wanting to stand beneath it forever.

She excused herself to take a business call upstairs, disappearing into her office without hurry.

I wandered through the shopping galleries below the building afterward, drifting from boutique to boutique without purpose, touching fabrics, holding delicate pieces of lace in my hands longer than necessary. The whole place felt wrapped in the same muted light as the clouds outside, as though time had agreed to move more slowly there.

By the time I returned, the apartment was almost silent.

He was waiting with two glasses of wine.

We talked.

About nothing.

About everything.

The kind of conversation that grows softer instead of louder.

The city lights shimmered outside while the rain blurred their edges into watercolor.

Eventually he stood.

“So much of this place feels unfinished without someone to share it with,” he said quietly.

I looked at him.

He looked back.

Neither of us moved at first.

Then, as naturally as rain finding the ground, the distance disappeared.

The kiss wasn’t hurried.

It wasn’t careful, either.

It felt like recognizing a melody you could have sworn you’d never heard before.

There was warmth despite the cold air drifting across the terrace. My heartbeat echoed louder than the water falling beside us. His hand rested lightly against my face, hesitant for only an instant before certainty replaced hesitation.

For one impossible moment, the entire city vanished.

There was only the rain.

The mist.

The endless gray sky folding around us.

And the feeling—not of love, not exactly—but of wanting something with no future and loving it anyway because it existed only now.

Then her voice broke the silence.

His name.

Sharp enough to slice through the rain.

We stepped apart.

She stood at the entrance to the terrace, perfectly composed except for the anger burning beneath her stillness.

Neither of us spoke.

She looked at him first.

Then at me.

He started to explain.

“It wasn’t—”

She raised a hand.

“No.”

He tried again, moving slightly in front of me as though to shield me from whatever came next.

“Don’t blame her.”

“I said no.”

There was something almost more painful in her restraint than there would have been in shouting.

She turned toward him.

“Go upstairs.”

For the first time that evening, he hesitated.

Then he obeyed.

The sound of his footsteps disappeared into the apartment until only the rain remained.

She walked toward me slowly.

Not with rage.

With certainty.

When she stopped, we were only a few feet apart.

“I want you to leave.”

Nothing else.

No accusations.

No insults.

Just a sentence spoken by someone who had already accepted what could not be undone.

Behind her, the pool reflected the bruised sky.

The water continued falling from the stone wall in its endless silver sheet.

The city stretched forever below us, every light blurred by mist until they looked like distant stars beneath the clouds instead of above them.

I wanted to say I was sorry.

I wanted to explain something I didn’t understand myself.

Instead I only stood there, surrounded by rain and marble and violet light, overcome by the impossible feeling that none of this had ever truly belonged to the waking world.

Then everything dissolved.

When I opened my eyes, morning had replaced the storm.

But for several quiet moments, I could still feel the cold mist against my skin.

Sometimes I think I miss him.

Then I remember it isn’t him I miss.

It’s the rain.

The terrace suspended above a sleeping city.

The endless curtain of water.

The gray-blue hush that wrapped around every heartbeat.

The strange, beautiful ache of wanting to return to a place that never existed at all.