The Bookstore That Waited for Rain

 

The rain started the day she left, and it never really stopped. Not in his mind, not in the small town of Hollowbrook, and certainly not in the dim corner of the bookstore where he used to wait for her. Elias had always been the quiet type, the kind you’d walk past on the street without remembering his face, the kind of man who folded his heart too neatly and placed it in envelopes he never sent. His love was like that too—silent, meticulous, unspoken.

Her name was Margo, and she had the sort of voice that made you think of old jazz songs playing in half-empty cafés. She wore chipped nail polish, always in some shade of blue, and her eyes looked like they belonged to someone who had lived too many lives. She walked into his bookstore one summer with a bag full of rain-damp poetry books and a question about a book Elias didn’t even carry. He didn’t remember what she asked for. Only that she smiled when he admitted he didn’t have it.

She came back the next day, and the next, and every day after that for seven months and thirteen days. Sometimes she bought something, sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she just stood by the window, watching the street, tracing invisible letters on the glass with her finger. Elias never asked why she came. He was afraid that if he named it, whatever it was between them, it would vanish. Like fog when the sun rises.

They shared conversations the way strangers share glances in a train station—fleeting, uncertain, filled with longing. She told him about her grandmother who used to braid her hair, about how she once ran away from home just to see how far she could go on fifty dollars. Elias told her about his father, who used to read him Neruda by candlelight before he disappeared. They talked about everything but the things that mattered most. Like how Elias loved her. And how Margo was already slipping away.

She never said she was sick. Not once. But her voice got quieter. Her skin paler. She started sitting more, walking less. She winced when she laughed too hard, and once, she coughed until her sleeve turned crimson. Elias didn’t ask. He couldn’t. He told himself it was respect. Deep down, it was fear. He knew that some things, once spoken aloud, become irreversible.

One day, she didn’t show up. He waited an hour. Then two. Then all day, his knuckles white around a book he didn’t read. He closed the shop early and walked through the streets as if they might tell him where she went. Hollowbrook was small. People knew each other. But nobody knew Margo. Not really. She was a whisper in the wind, a shadow flickering between lamplights. She left nothing behind except the ghost of her perfume and a worn-out copy of The Bell Jar she had borrowed and never returned.

Elias waited for three days before he finally walked to the address she once scribbled on a napkin. It was a small apartment above a laundromat. The windows were closed, the curtains drawn. He knocked until his hand ached. No answer. He sat on the steps and stared at the rain pooling in the gutter. A neighbor eventually emerged, an older woman with tired eyes and too many grocery bags.

“She left,” she said. “Moved out last night. Took nothing but a suitcase. Didn’t even leave a note.”

Elias wanted to scream. Instead, he said thank you and walked back through the drizzle, each raindrop heavier than the last. That night, he lay on the cold wooden floor of the bookstore and listened to the storm, pretending it was her breathing.

Weeks passed. Then months. The world moved forward in its cruel, indifferent way. The bookstore remained unchanged—dusty, dim, and filled with volumes no one read. People came and went. Elias stayed. He folded her memory into corners of the shop, like bookmarks she forgot to take with her. Sometimes, he thought he saw her reflection in the window, only to find it was his own.

He wrote her letters he never mailed. Hundreds of them. Folded into books she used to touch. He reread the poems she liked until they no longer made sense. Her favorite was “Having a Coke with You” by Frank O’Hara. She once said it was how she wanted to be loved—messily, passionately, unreasonably. Elias loved her like that, just never out loud.

The pathetic thing wasn’t that she left. The pathetic thing was that he never told her not to. That he never told her to stay. That he never asked her where it hurt or why she flinched when she laughed or why she looked at him like she was already saying goodbye.

A year later, a letter arrived. Postmarked from Montreal. No return address. Just his name, written in her uneven scrawl.

“Dear Elias,
I don’t know how to begin this, so I’ll just say what I couldn’t before. I was dying. Still am. The doctors gave me a timeline, like my life was a limited edition book, and I had just a few pages left to turn. I didn’t want you to watch me fade. I didn’t want to become another ghost in your life. You looked too kind for that.
But I loved you. I still do. Not the way people write about in novels, not the kind that’s all fireworks and fate. It was quieter than that. Like the way the bookstore smelled on rainy days. Like how your eyes softened when you looked at me, even when you didn’t say a word.
I wish I’d been braver. I wish you had been too. Maybe in another life.
M.”

Elias cried for the first time in ten years. Not the kind of tears you wipe away quickly. The kind that leave your whole body aching, your ribs sore, like grief had made a home there.

He closed the bookstore for a week. Wandered around Hollowbrook with her letter in his coat pocket, holding it like a relic. He whispered her name to the trees, to the wind, to the mirror. But she never answered.

Eventually, he opened the shop again. Not because he had moved on. But because some people stay even after they leave. Margo had become part of the walls, the shelves, the smell of old paper. She was in every dog-eared page, in the creak of the door, in the quiet hours before closing when the world went still.

Elias grew older. Lines etched themselves into his skin. His hands trembled more when he shelved books. But every year, on the day she left, he’d write her a letter. Sometimes long, sometimes just a sentence. He kept them in a box under the counter. The last one read:

“If you ever come back, I’ll be here. I’ll be the one who never stopped waiting.”

But she never came back.

The world forgot her, as it forgets all things in time. But Elias didn’t. And maybe that’s what love is, in its most pathetic form—not something loud or beautiful or even returned. Just the quiet refusal to forget.

And so he waited. Not for her. But for the sound of the doorbell on a rainy day. For chipped blue nails on a poetry spine. For a smile that once said, “I’m here. I came back.”

But it never came.

And he loved her anyway