“Do you believe in aliens?” she asked, lazily stirring her drink. The ice clicked softly against the glass.

“That’s not really the point.” I kept scrolling through my phone. “Whether I believe in them or not doesn’t change the fact that they exist.”

She let out a small scoff and turned toward the window. Outside, the streetlights had turned the wet pavement silver, like a mirror someone had wiped too hard.

“You always do that,” she said. “You make everything sound so final. Fact is such a heavy word. Like a stone hitting water and refusing to sink.”

“And if it sank?” I flipped my phone over, letting the screen go dark. “Are you looking for an answer, or a story?”

She turned back to me, curiosity flickering in her eyes.

“What if I want a story?”

“Then facts become softer,” I said. “For instance, on another planet, the night sky isn’t black. It’s blue, the kind of blue that looks soaked in rain. Children tie pieces of wind around their fingers and walk home from school carrying little bags of clouds. No one there has weekends, because time folds like paper, and every crease becomes a holiday.”

She laughed, her straw tracing circles at the bottom of the glass.

“That sounds like a child’s dream.”

“You don’t like children?”

“I like the way they lie with such conviction.”

I laughed too, tapping the rim of my glass with one finger. It answered with a clean, delicate ring.

“So you want me to be honest?”

She nodded.

“Tell me honestly. Do you believe?”

I thought about it for a moment.

“If believing means being willing to give yourself over to something invisible, something you can’t prove but that still has the power to change you, then yes. I believe.”

“Pretty answer.” She said pretty almost under her breath. “So why didn’t you just say that from the start?”

“Because I couldn’t tell whether you wanted agreement or resistance.” I paused. “Sometimes people ask questions not because they want an answer, but because they want to see what the answer reveals.”

She propped her chin on her hand.

“And what did yours reveal?”

“That I have a weakness for things that exist without needing my permission,” I said. “Cold weather. Tides. Insomnia. They don’t care whether I believe in them.”

Her eyes drifted to my phone, then back to me.

“And?”

I leaned forward and pushed my phone farther away.

“And there’s another story. One you might not want to hear.”

“I do.” She exhaled softly, as if testing the temperature of the night. “Tell me.”

“Alright,” I said. “It’s a story about existence.”

She rested her chin in her hand and waited. Outside, the wind stirred the advertising umbrellas along the street, their fabric flapping faintly, like the beginning of a countdown.

“In a place very far from here, the sky holds ten times as many stars. People don’t check the time, because they can hear light moving. The night there has a temperature, almost like breath. When it touches your skin, you can feel the echo of a heartbeat.”

She smiled, light bending at the corners of her eyes.

“You’re making this up again.”

“Maybe.”

She tilted her head.

“What’s that place called?”

“It doesn’t have a name.” I shook my head. “They don’t use names there. They recognize one another by frequency. Everyone is born with a vibration that belongs only to them.”

“Frequency,” she repeated, as if tasting the word.

“Yes.” I touched my chest. “Like a heartbeat, except it isn’t beating for itself.”

After that, she went quiet. She only stirred the ice at the bottom of her glass, the sound small and fragile. The light caught in her hair, flickering like a signal disturbed by the wind.

I went on.

“Sometimes I think human beings all came from somewhere else. We just forgot the way back.”

“Why would you think that?” she asked, looking up.

For a second, something in her expression changed. She seemed far away, as if the sentence had touched a place she hadn’t meant to show me.

Time slowed. The rain, the light, her breathing — all of it slipped into the same rhythm.

I stood up slowly, leaned close to her ear, and let my breath brush the side of her neck.

“Because I’m not from here.”