two cups still steaming—
only one pair of hands moves,
the story begins
—
We were sitting in a dim café near Bern’s old clocktower, the kind that still smelled faintly of roasted chestnuts and old wood polish. The café had chipped brick walls, small arched windows fogged with breath and winter, and tables that wobbled if you leaned too hard into your elbows. The ceiling hung low, giving it that cloistered monastery feel, and the lights—bare bulbs wrapped in paper lanterns—cast a drowsy amber glow that made time feel soft around the edges.
She wore a green scarf tucked tightly around her collarbone, like someone who had been walking into wind for a decade. We hadn’t seen each other in five years. Five years that had curled inwards like a fern under frost.
“Still chasing storms?” she asked, her voice playful but hushed, stirring her tea absentmindedly. She didn’t lift it. Just watched the swirl of milk vanish like a thought half-remembered.
“More like learning to watch the sky first,” I said, trying to match her metaphor. “You?”
She smiled—tired and bright at the same time—the way people do when they’ve learned how to hold disappointment like an old friend.
“I left New York,” she said, and something in her posture softened. “Again.”
I looked up. “But that was the plan, wasn’t it? The rooftop parties? The subway poetry?”
“I thought so too,” she said. “But it turns out, being good at surviving isn’t the same as being passionate.”
—
She told me how London taught her to perform poise under fluorescent light, how to cry in a bathroom stall at work without smudging her eyeliner, how to talk about the weather when her world was collapsing.
She said New York taught her velocity—that you could move every minute of the day and still go nowhere. That you could be in a room full of people and feel like wallpaper.
“In London, people pretend not to see you. In New York, they see you too fast. I got tired of both.”
There was a silence then. Wide, unhurried. A silence that felt earned.
“What about you?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Still restless. But a bit less eager to call it passion.”
She laughed. “That’s the most honest thing you’ve ever said.”
—
We talked about jobs we didn’t care for—spreadsheets, branding decks, campaigns with no soul. Apartments that smelled like mildew and someone else’s cologne. Mornings when waking up felt like starting someone else’s life.
“You know what I envy?” she asked, tilting her cup just to hear the last sip shift inside. “People who grow roots without feeling stuck.”
I nodded. “And people who grow wings without needing a runway.”
She looked at me. “So what are we then?”
“I think we’re just people who got good at noticing. That’s a kind of passion, too.”
—
She finally finished her tea. Held the cup with both hands as if she were weighing a memory.
“I used to think passion had to look like fire,” she said. “Like urgency. Like being consumed. But now I think it’s just showing up. Not letting the days blur. Letting a place touch you, without letting it own you.”
From her bag, she pulled out a notebook—creased at the corners, held together by a rubber band.
“This is the only thing I’ve kept from every city,” she said.
Inside were quick sketches—graffiti tags, hands, shadows on fire escapes. Snippets of conversations overheard on trains. A pressed flower between two ticket stubs. And in the middle, on a torn page, a line written in pen that had bled slightly:
It’s not about what you love.It’s about how you love, quietly, consistently, even when no one is watching.
—
What She Taught Me (Even If She Didn’t Mean To)
- Passion doesn’t shout. It stays. It notices. It remembers.
- The places you live aren’t trophies. They’re weather systems. Let them change you.
- You don’t need a calling. You need a rhythm—your own way of showing up, curious, honest, unfinished.
- Sometimes, passion is the ability to sit across from someone, let them speak their truth, and not feel the need to correct it with your own.
—
Outside, the bells of Zytglogge rang. We both turned toward the sound, as if some part of us was still synchronized with old machines.
I asked, “Will you stay in Bern?”
She stood, adjusting her scarf. The green was starting to unravel at the end.
“Long enough to learn something.”
She walked out into the wind.
And I stayed there a little longer, holding her empty cup.
Still warm.
life 
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