The rain always seemed heavier in Toronto when you were already feeling small. Zakir had noticed that much. The water pooled along the cracked sidewalks, swirling cigarette butts and lost receipts into puddles that looked like broken windows. He stood at the edge of Queen Street, fingers shoved deep into his jacket pockets, watching the light change from green to red and back again, not moving. There was nowhere urgent to be, no one waiting for him.
It was a Tuesday when he first saw her.
She stood alone at the streetcar stop, her face tilted upward, eyes closed, letting the rain hit her directly. No umbrella. No hood. Just her dark hair, soaked and sticking to her cheeks like thin threads. There was something defiant about it, the way she stood there, as if daring the city to drown her. Zakir thought she was either beautifully tragic or just incredibly stupid. Maybe both. Either way, he couldn’t look away.
The streetcar arrived, and he followed her on without thinking. She sat near the middle, earbuds in, a plastic grocery bag on her lap — ramen and a sad, squashed box of frozen dumplings inside. He sat two rows back, pretending not to stare. The condensation on the windows blurred everything outside into an impressionist painting of neon and headlights.
When the streetcar jerked to a stop, her bag tipped over, the ramen packet sliding out and landing in the aisle. Zakir, before his brain could catch up with his body, leaned down and picked it up.
“Spicy,” he said, holding it out to her. “Good choice.”
She took it from his hand, her fingers barely brushing his. “It’s not that spicy,” she said, voice flat but soft, like a page turning in a library. “It just pretends to be.”
Zakir laughed, too loud for the quiet space, and she gave him a look — not annoyed exactly, just confused that someone could find her that funny.
“I’m Zakir,” he blurted.
She stared at him for a second longer, then shrugged. “Mira.”
That was how it began. No romantic spark, no grand moment — just a boy handing a girl a packet of instant noodles on a rainy streetcar in Toronto.
They saw each other again two days later. Not planned. At least, not by her. Zakir might have taken the same streetcar route at the same time on purpose. She was standing at the exact same stop, wearing the same oversized coat, a halo of damp hair framing her tired face. This time, he sat beside her.
“You’re following me,” she said, not a question.
“Toronto’s small,” he said, which was both a lie and an excuse. “Besides, you still owe me a conversation.”
“I do?” Her brow arched.
“For saving your ramen.” He smiled, and somehow, impossibly, she smiled back.
They ended up sitting under the awning of a vape shop, sharing a cigarette neither of them really wanted. The rain had softened into a mist, clinging to their clothes. Mira talked about nothing — how much she hated her roommate, how the elevators in her building always smelled like boiled cabbage, how her ex-boyfriend’s band was “all talent and zero soul.” Zakir listened like it was scripture.
He didn’t tell her how lonely he was, or how many nights he spent pacing his apartment, refreshing his messages and finding nothing but spam emails and family group texts. He didn’t tell her how often he replayed the sound of her voice in his head just to have something beautiful to hold onto. Instead, he laughed when she laughed, nodded when she spoke, and let her sadness wash over him like the rain.
They became something close to friends — if you could call stolen moments at bus stops and shared noodle cups in playgrounds friendship. Zakir wanted to ask her out properly, to take her somewhere with chairs that weren’t bolted to the floor, but every time he opened his mouth, the words tangled into knots.
Mira was like a ghost in the daylight — half-present, half-fading. She would smile, but only with her mouth, her eyes always somewhere far away. She had a playlist called songs for crying at the bus stop, and Zakir listened to it when she wasn’t around, trying to understand her through sad lyrics and echoing guitars.
Then, one night, she didn’t show up.
They had made a plan — not officially, but one of those unspoken understandings where they always ended up at the same corner at the same time. Zakir waited in the rain for almost two hours, pacing under the flickering streetlight, shoes soaked through. His phone stayed silent.
He texted her once:
u okay?
Read at 8:42 p.m.
There was no reply.
The next day, and the day after that, he checked the same street corner, but Mira was gone.
Zakir tried to move on the way you try to move a stubborn piece of furniture — with too much force and not enough direction. He went to bars with coworkers he barely liked, downloaded dating apps, and went on two dates with a girl named Sarah who loved true crime podcasts and said “like” too much. It wasn’t the same.
At night, he still walked the streets Mira used to haunt. He’d pause at the convenience store where they bought noodles, or the bench where she told him she once tried to write a poem but got bored halfway through. Her ghost was everywhere, but just out of reach.
Once, drunk on cheap whiskey and bad decisions, he left her a voicemail. His voice cracked halfway through, but he didn’t hang up.
“Hey, Mira. It’s Zakir. Um. I just… I hope you’re okay. I miss you. Not in, like, a weird way — okay, maybe in a weird way. I just… I hope you’re okay.”
He never got a call back.
Months passed, and Mira became a story Zakir told himself on nights when the city felt too big and too empty. A brief, pathetic love story, all rain and silence and almosts.
Until one afternoon, walking through Kensington Market, he saw her.
She was sitting outside a coffee shop, laughing at something a guy across the table had said. The guy was tall, broad-shouldered, the kind of handsome that belonged in beer commercials. Mira’s hair was shorter, her coat replaced by a soft pink sweater. She looked different. Softer. Happier.
Zakir stood there, frozen in the middle of the sidewalk, a plastic bag of groceries hanging limp from his hand. He thought about going over, saying something — a joke, an apology, anything. But what could he say that would matter?
Instead, he turned and walked away.
Because some people disappear for a reason. And some people are only meant to be rainstorms — passing through, leaving you wet and cold, but alive.
Zakir’s life didn’t turn into a grand tragedy or a beautiful redemption arc. He didn’t become a poet or a songwriter. He worked at a call center, explaining phone bills to strangers who forgot his name the second they hung up. He lived in the same one-bedroom apartment with the same flickering light in the kitchen.
But sometimes, on rainy nights, he stood at the streetcar stop on Queen Street, hands deep in his pockets, waiting for a ghost that would never return. And sometimes, he listened to her playlist — songs for crying at the bus stop — and let himself believe, just for a moment, that pathetic love stories were still love stories, too.
Because even the saddest stories deserve to be remembered
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