Elias had a quiet way of existing.

  He wasn’t particularly tall or short. His face didn’t linger in anyone’s memory. He worked in a beige office where the printer jammed every Tuesday and people asked how his weekend was without waiting for an answer.

  Most evenings, he made the same dinner—scrambled eggs with too much pepper. He sat on the floor, even though he had a perfectly fine couch, and ate in front of the bookshelf he had filled over the years. Fantasy novels, mostly. Worn and loved. Stories where orphans became kings, broken boys summoned dragons, and time bent backwards for those who needed it most.

  He often wished it could do that—for him.

  Not to change everything. Just… one moment.

  One second where he could have turned around and said what he was too scared to. One breath where he didn’t let silence win. But life wasn’t a novel, and no one handed you magic just for needing it.

  Elias was twenty-nine. He had a steady job, a small apartment, and a mother who no longer remembered what day it was. He had no one waiting for him when he came home, and no one who noticed when he didn’t.

  He wasn’t unhappy. But there was something worse lingering beneath that.

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  He was unwritten.

  ?

  He used to dream big.

  When he was six, he wrapped towels around his shoulders and called them capes. Pretended the floor was lava and the couch was a castle. His father would lift him up with one arm and say, “You’re stronger than you think.” Elias believed him, then.

  But when he turned seven, his father left without a word. No note. No suitcase. Just vanished one Tuesday morning like a sentence someone forgot to finish.

  His mother stopped humming after that. Her eyes seemed to look past him, like she was always remembering something painful.

  Elias never asked what happened.

  And she never told him.

  ?

  At the office, he was known as dependable. The kind of person who remembered birthdays and brought spare pens. But no one really knew him. Not even the ones who shared lunch.

  And maybe that was his fault.

  Maybe he stopped believing he had anything worth showing.

  ?

  That night, he sat on the floor, one hand resting on the open page of a book he’d read four times before. His eyes weren’t following the lines anymore.

  Instead, he watched the light from the streetlamps bend across his window. It made him think of something a girl once told him.

  Leila.

  She said twilight was the moment the world stopped pretending.

  That’s how she said things—like life was a story and she was just trying to find the right metaphor.

  They met in college. She was an art student. He was studying literature because it felt like something safe. They used to sit on the library roof until the sky turned the color of burnt gold. He’d never told her how he felt.

  He wanted to.

  But the moment passed.

  Like so many others.

  He lost touch after graduation. She moved to another city. Started sending fewer and fewer emails until they stopped altogether.

  And Elias never reached out. Not once.

  He told himself she probably forgot him.

  The truth was, he just didn’t know what he would say.

  ?

  He closed the book, let his head fall back against the wall.

  He whispered, barely audible:

  “I wish I could go back.”

  Not to fix everything. Just to try one more time.

  But there was no magic in this world.

  Just people who carried their regrets like bookmarks in their hearts.