Elias Mercer stood on the platform of the A-train at Spring Street, the screech of wheels echoing under the fluorescent lights. He pressed his camera bag strap tight against his shoulder, the familiar weight a comfort. In the distance, across quicksilver tracks, he glimpsed a figure in the station opposite.
Avery, mid-stride, silhouetted under another lamppost, talking and laughing with someone whose face he couldn't make out.
Years ago, Avery had leaned into Elias in that very station and said softly, "I don't want just to pass time. I want better."
Elias looked down at the holes in his old sweater, where threads had worn thin at the elbows. He recalled how Avery had pointed them out gently, almost parent-like, asking whether those worn stitches meant anything. He had told Avery he tethered him like a lamppost, safe, fixed, guiding.
But now, the lamppost cast shadows that moved. Avery stepped away from it. And across the tracks, Elias felt the glimmer.
He raised his camera to his eye, but his vision wasn't clear, the lens caught the blurred figure, a flash of blonde hair, a laugh. The image haunted him more than it captured. He realized, there's nothing worse than seeing your lover moving on while you still suffer.
He lowered the camera. The train doors hissed open. He boarded, the car filled with commuters worn by rain and fatigue. He found no seat, so he stood, fingers wrapped around the strap. Outside the window, the city lights shifted in streaks. He thought of Avery's voice, the dream she once whispered, "You wanted better."
The lights of the lamppost outside flickered. He imagined it as a beacon, a place where you tether someone and yet, he realized, what if you're the one being tethered, the one set still while someone else moves on?
Back in his loft later, he looked at the photographs from his latest shoot. They were technically perfect, but hollow. His mind kept returning to the sweater, the holes. He felt sick of all the holes in the sweater and in himself.
The next morning, he printed one of the platform images, a blur of motion, a stationary figure watching across tracks. He titled it Lamppost Dreamers.
He had one question now,
Can he still open himself to someone new when every memory of Avery's neck, her scent, the way she looked at him, still felt like skin? He didn't want to have to kiss someone else's neck and pretend it was hers.
And so, he waited.
~~~~~~
The waiting turned into a habit, something that wove itself silently into the corners of his routine. He didn't realize it at first. He simply kept choosing the same coffee shop where Avery once slipped cold hands under his coat and kissed his jaw. He kept standing at the same window in the loft where their shadows once stretched together across the old wooden floor. He kept replaying fragments of memory, small, mundane things no one else would consider worth remembering.
The way Avery always peeled off fruit stickers and stuck them to the fridge door. The way she pronounced Tuesday like it was an apology. The way her laughter didn't start loud but built, like watching a match flare into full flame.
He waited, and he wondered.
It wasn't that Avery had left him in cruelty. There had been no shouting, no door slammed so hard the frame shook. No betrayal. Just a quiet unraveling, thread by thread. Love doesn't always end like thunder. Sometimes it ends like the slow dimming of a lamp bulb, flicker by flicker.
Avery had wanted better. Better did not mean Elias. That was the part that hurt the most.
~~~~~~
The gallery exhibit was in three weeks. People wanted to see his work. They wanted to see something raw, moving, alive. But everything he shot came out washed. Like the colors of his world had faded without Avery's laughter echoing in it.
His friend Milo stopped by the loft one afternoon. Milo had always been direct brutally. He plucked the Lamppost Dreamers print from the drying rack and studied it.
"You still bleeding her into your work."
Elias didn't respond.
Milo continued, "You photograph grief like you want it to stay."
Elias sat on the edge of the worktable. "Maybe I do. Grief is the last thing of her that I have."
Milo didn't flinch at that. "You don't need to burn yourself every day to remember fire."
But Elias didn't know how to stop.
A week later, rain followed him again, this time to a small gallery in Williamsburg where a friend of his hosted a poetry night. He went just to avoid being inside his own skull.
The room was candle-lit, the air thick with perfume oil and damp wool. People sat cross-legged on the floor, wine glasses perched on their knees.
The poet on stage spoke of leaving lovers like old houses, light switches you never fully learned.
And then, she walked in.
Not Avery, someone else.
Someone with dark curls, wearing a paint-splattered denim jacket and heavy boots. She carried an easel case and smelled faintly of varnish. She sat beside him without hesitation, as though the floor had always been hers to claim.
"Hi," she whispered.
He blinked. "Hey."
"My shoes are soaked," she said, lifting a foot and wrinkling her nose. "I stepped in every puddle between here and the subway. Tragic, really."
For the first time in months, Elias laughed. Quiet. Small. But real.
She grinned like she'd earned it.
"My name's Celine."
Elias' breath caught.
Celine.
The name tugged something loose inside him, soft, unfamiliar, but not unwelcome.
He hesitated. "Elias."
Celine nodded slowly, like she was tucking his name somewhere careful.
The poet finished. Applause filled the room. Celine leaned closer, voice soft,
"You look like someone who's been waiting for a long time."
His throat tightened.
"I have," he whispered.
She didn't pry. She didn't ask who or why or how long.
She just sat beside him.
Present. Unsolicited. Alive.
Over the next days, they crossed each other's paths in ways that felt almost fated.
The same coffee shop. The same late train. The same rain darkened streets.
Celine painted cityscapes at odd hours. She worked with colors Elias hadn't seen in months, electric oranges, velvet greens, blues that looked like breath held in a moment of awe. She moved like someone who trusted the world, like falling was just another kind of dance.
Elias found himself watching her hands a lot, the way they curled around brushes, the way they moved when she talked, animated, as though every thought deserved to be sculpted in the air.
He didn't tell her about Avery.
Not at first. Not because he wanted to hide her. But because speaking Avery aloud felt like peeling open sutures too soon.
Celine didn't push, she simply saw him.
And seeing him, really seeing him was something Elias had convinced himself would never happen again.
~~~~~~
One evening, they sat on the steps outside his building. Summer heat lingered on the brick. Streetlamps flickered in that same familiar way.
Celine looked at him, the lamppost glow catching in her eyes.
"Who did you lose?" she asked gently.
Elias didn't speak for a long time.
"Avery," he whispered. "I thought I anchored her. But maybe I just held her still when she wanted to move."
Celine nodded.
"That's the thing about lampposts," she murmured. "They only light the way. They don't tell you where to go."
He closed his eyes, something in his chest cracked, not painfully, but like ice breaking in spring.
He didn't realize until then how long it had been since he breathed fully.
Days passed.
And grief did not disappear. Grief is not something that vanishes when someone new arrives.
But it changed shape.
Avery remained a memory, a soft photograph tucked between pages. Not a wound. Not a void.
Just a story in him.
Celine did not replace Avery. She did not need to.
She was something else entirely, not a lamppost, but a spark.
Elias picked up his camera again. But when he looked through the viewfinder, the world no longer looked empty. He photographed Celine's hands dipped in paint, the streaks of color on her jeans, the quiet fury of her laughter.
His gallery show opened on a warm autumn night. People moved through the space like ghosts made of questions. Someone paused in front of Lamppost Dreamers.
They whispered, "It feels like goodbye."
Elias stood behind them, camera hanging around his neck, sweater finally mended, not to hide the holes, but because some things deserved care.
He spoke aloud, mostly to himself.
"No… It feels like letting go."
And for the first time in a long time, he meant it.