Every night at 2:00 a.m., the lights came on in the small attic above apartment 6B.
It wasn’t loud. Just a faint hum of jazz and the quiet scratch of brush against canvas.
She noticed because she was always awake too.
Her name was Mara.
She lived in 6A. A writer with a broken sleep schedule and a window that faced his.
She never saw him during the day.
Only in flashes — when he stretched, or leaned forward, painting something no one ever saw.
For weeks, she watched without meaning to.
And over time, she started making stories.
“He paints lost memories,” she whispered one night.
“Or maybe… people he misses.”
She thought of waving once.
She didn’t.
Instead, she began writing letters. Not to send — just to write.
To a stranger with soft hands and sleepy eyes.
She told him about the stars she used to count as a child.
The ones she hadn’t looked at in years.
One evening, she fell asleep by the window.
When she woke, there was something new.
A tiny canvas leaned on her fire escape.
Painted stars.
Gold, silver, soft white strokes… and in the center: a girl in a window.
She gasped.
He had seen her too.
Over the next nights, the paintings kept coming.
One of a coffee mug. Hers.
One of her cat. Sleeping.
One of her — laughing.
And then, one night, nothing came.
Just darkness.
She waited. Minutes. Hours.
Then at 3:00 a.m., she opened her window and whispered,
“I see you too.”
Across the way, his light flickered on.
And finally —
he waved.
He looked like every star she had ever drawn in the corners of her notebooks as a child.
Soft. Quiet. Bright in his own way.
The next night, she left a note with her story.
He left her a new painting —
of a sky filled with stars,
each one shaped like a word she had written.
They never spoke much.
But some love stories don’t need voices.
Only windows, stars, and a man who paints them
for the girl who always watched.