Chapter 0: Tête-à-Tête Part 2

月夢餐室

It began as a quiet, unspoken ritual. Neither of them had planned it, but somehow, they kept orbiting each other, drawn by the gravity of a moment neither could fully let go of.

Lyra started going to Yuet Mung every Thursday night. She told herself it was for the quiet, the way the shop dimmed as the evening wore on. But in truth, it was because she had noticed Evren there once, sitting at a table near the window, his cigarette smouldering in the ashtray, the faint glow of his phone casting shadows on his face.

Evren had noticed her too. He didn’t know why, but the sight of her sitting alone with her notebook had stayed with him. She had looked so absorbed, so lost in whatever world she was writing, that it unsettled him. He hadn’t spoken to her that night, but he had started going back to the shop, hoping to catch her there again.

It wasn’t long before their paths began crossing in small, deliberate ways. Lyra would glance up from her notebook and see Evren walking in, his expression unreadable but his eyes flicking toward her for just a moment before he found a seat. Evren would pretend not to notice the way she always looked up just as he entered, as if she’d been waiting for him.

At first, their conversations were brief. A comment about the rain. A question about what she was writing. A passing remark about the music playing in the shop. But each encounter felt like a thread tying them closer, and they began to crave those moments, to seek them out even as they pretended not to.

It was during one of their conversations that Lyra first mentioned her sleepless nights. She didn’t say much, just that she’d been struggling to fall asleep, that her mind wouldn’t quiet down. Evren had nodded in understanding, but he hadn’t pressed her for more.

What she didn’t tell him was that her insomnia had become unbearable. Nights stretched endlessly, her thoughts spinning in circles, her body aching for rest. And so, she had turned to sleeping pills, at first taking them sparingly, then more often, until they became a lifeline she couldn’t let go of. She began to look forward to sleep, not just for the reprieve from wakefulness, but for the chance to see him there.

Lyra started dreaming about Evren. In her dreams, they were always at Yuet Mung, though it never looked quite the same. The light was softer, the air thicker, and the rain outside seemed endless. He would sit across from her, his cigarette smouldering, his eyes fixed on hers. They spoke without words, their thoughts somehow spilling into each other’s minds, and for those fleeting moments, she felt like she truly knew him.

The dreams grew vivid, almost too real, and she began chasing them. Each night, she would take her pills and lie down, hoping to find him waiting for her in that strange, half-formed version of Yuet Mung. She didn’t tell him about the dreams, didn’t tell anyone, but they became her secret solace, a place where she didn’t have to question what they meant to each other.

Evren, too, found himself haunted by dreams of Lyra. They came without warning, slipping into his mind in the early hours of the morning. Sometimes, she was sitting at her usual table, her notebook open, her pen moving across the page. Other times, she was walking through the rain, her coat trailing behind her, her face turned toward the sky. He never spoke to her in the dreams, but he woke up with the feeling that he had been close to something important, something he couldn’t quite grasp.

The dreams began to blur the line between reality and memory. Evren found himself seeking her out not just at Yuet Mung, but in the spaces he photographed, in the corners of the city where he thought she might appear. He wanted to capture her as she existed in his dreams, to preserve the way she seemed both tangible and elusive, like a ghost he couldn’t let go of.

But for Lyra, the dreams weren’t enough. They were fleeting, slipping through her fingers the moment she opened her eyes. She started taking more pills, just enough to stay in that dream world a little longer, to hold onto Evren for just a few more moments. She told herself it was harmless, that it didn’t matter as long as she could sleep, as long as she could see him.

One night, after they had talked for hours, Lyra closed her notebook and stared at him. “Do you ever think about the first time we met?” she asked.

Evren exhaled a stream of smoke, his eyes fixed on the rain outside. “I think about it all the time,” he said.

She hesitated, her fingers tracing the edge of her cup. “It felt… different then. Like it wasn’t supposed to happen, but it did.”

He nodded, his expression unreadable. “Now it feels like we’re trying to make it happen again.”

Lyra looked down at her notebook, her thoughts a tangled mess of contradictions. She wanted to know him, to understand the way his mind worked, to see the world the way he saw it. But she also missed the mystery of that first night, the way he had been a stranger who felt like a question she didn’t know how to answer.

For Evren, it was the same. He wanted to capture her, to preserve the way she existed in fleeting moments. But the more he got to know her, the harder it became to see her as she had been that first night, unreachable, untouchable, a blur of rain and light and possibility.

They began to pull back, unconsciously creating space between them. Lyra stopped going to the coffee shop every Thursday, choosing instead to wander the city at random, hoping to stumble upon him the way she had that first night. Evren started taking photographs of other things, the harbour at sunrise, the empty streets just before dawn—but none of them felt right.

When they did run into each other, the conversations were shorter, more tentative. They both felt the weight of what had changed, though neither of them could quite name it.

One evening, Lyra found herself standing in front of the coffee shop, the rain soaking through her coat. She didn’t go inside. Instead, she stood there, staring at the window, remembering the way it had felt to sit there with him, to not know anything about him except that he had noticed her, and she had noticed him.

Evren saw her from across the street. For a moment, he thought about crossing over, about saying something, but he stayed where he was, hidden in the shadows. He didn’t know why.

That night, Lyra took two pills instead of one, lying down with the hope that she would find him in her dreams. And she did. They sat across from each other in the dream in Yuet Mung, the rain falling harder than it ever had in reality. She reached for his hand, and for a moment, she thought she felt it, warm and solid beneath hers. But then the dream began to fade, and she woke up with tears on her cheeks.

Evren woke up that same night, the image of her face lingering in his mind like an afterimage. He stared at the ceiling, wondering if she had seen him too, if somehow their dreams had crossed the way their paths had once.

It was a paradox they couldn’t escape. The closer they got to each other, the further they drifted from that first encounter, the moment that had defined them, that had brought them together in the first place. They wanted to relive it, to recreate the magic of not knowing, of discovering each other in fragments. But the more they tried, the more it slipped away, like rain disappearing into the cracks of the pavement.

And yet, neither of them could let go. They kept coming back to the same places, hoping that somehow, some way, they could find their way back to that night. Not realizing that the moment they were chasing was never meant to last, it was meant to pass through them, leaving its mark, and then fade into the city’s endless hum.

But still, they chased it. Because even in its fading, it was more real than anything else they had ever known. And when the city fell silent, and the world dissolved into dreams, they both hoped to find each other there, in the spaces where reality couldn’t follow.