Leon Adler had never said goodbye to anyone in his life. Not to his dying mother, whose last breath
he witnessed with a silence that lasted three days afterward. Not to the lovers who had wandered
in and out of his life like visitors to a museum—briefly interested, ultimately departing. Not even to
himself, as he gradually disappeared from the memories of those who had once known him.
It wasn’t rudeness or callousness that prevented these farewells. It was something deeper, more
fundamental—an inability to acknowledge endings, as if by refusing to name them, he might deny
their existence altogether.
In a world that prized closure, that insisted on neat endings and properly tied narrative bows, Leon
remained stubbornly open-ended. His life was a sentence without a period, a book without a final
chapter, a song that faded out rather than resolving into a definitive chord.
He had been this way since childhood, when his father had left without explanation, walking out the
door one ordinary Tuesday and never returning. Leon had stood at the window for hours, watching
the empty street, waiting for his father’s familiar silhouette to reappear. It never did.
When his mother tried to explain that his father was gone, that he wasn’t coming back, Leon had
simply nodded and said, “He’s just not here right now.” Not a denial, exactly, but a refusal to accept
the permanence of the departure. In Leon’s mind, his father was perpetually on the verge of return,
eternally approaching but never quite arriving.
This belief—that nothing ever truly ended, that absence was just presence relocated—had calcified
over time into a kind of personal philosophy. Leon moved through the world as if it were a vast
waiting room, every departure merely temporary, every goodbye merely a pause in an ongoing
conversation.
It made him strange, this refusal to acknowledge endings. It gave him a quality of incompleteness
that people found both fascinating and maddening. Women were drawn to him, sensing some
depth they longed to plumb, only to discover that Leon was not so much deep as he was
unfinished, a sketch rather than a portrait.
He had worked in the bookstore for seven years, though “worked” might be too definitive a term for
what he did. He occupied the space, tended to the books, engaged with customers in his peculiar,
elliptical way. The store had belonged to his mother, and after her death (which Leon referred to as
her “stepping into the next room”), he had simply continued to open it each morning and close it
each evening, as if nothing had changed.
The books themselves suited him. Each one a world that existed in parallel to this one, each story a
life he could step into and out of at will. He particularly loved books with ambiguous endings,
stories that refused the comfort of resolution. He priced these highest of all, valuing them
according to the power of their final lines, the resonance of their last pages.
The morning Elya Merrick entered his store, Leon was reading a novel about a woman who
disappeared, leaving behind only a series of letters that might or might not have been forgeries. The
final page contained a sentence that had haunted him for days: “The truth is not in what was
written, but in what was left unwritten.”
The bell above the door announced her arrival, but Leon didn’t look up immediately. He was in the
habit of letting customers browse undisturbed, believing that books found people rather than the
other way around.
When he finally raised his eyes, he saw a woman in her early thirties, dark hair cut in a severe bob
that emphasized the sharp angles of her face. She moved deliberately through the stacks, her
fingers trailing along the spines of books as if reading them through touch rather than sight.
There was something about her that caught his attention, a quality of alertness combined with a
profound distraction, as if she were simultaneously hyper-aware of her surroundings and
completely detached from them. She reminded him of a bird he had once seen, poised on a
branch, ready for flight but momentarily arrested by some invisible consideration.
He watched her select a book—a slim volume of poetry by a writer known for her explorations of
absence and loss—and bring it to the counter. Only then did he notice her eyes: dark and deep,
with a searching quality that made him feel both seen and overlooked at once.
“Have you ever said goodbye to anyone?” she asked, the question emerging unbidden from some
place she couldn’t name.
The question startled him. Not because it was personal—customers often became strangely
confessional in bookstores, as if the presence of so many revealed lives gave them permission to
reveal their own—but because it struck at the core of his being, the central paradox of his
existence.
Leon smiled, a small movement at the corner of his mouth, but did not answer. He took the book
from her, examined its final page, and wrote “$17” on a slip of paper, which he tucked between the
pages like a bookmark.
The woman—Elya, though he didn’t yet know her name—looked at him with a mixture of curiosity
and something that might have been recognition, though they had never met before. She paid for
the book and left, the unanswered question following her like a shadow.
After she was gone, Leon opened the book she had purchased and read its final lines: “The spaces
between us are not empty; they are filled with all the words we never said.” He felt a strange
sensation, as if the book had somehow predicted their brief encounter, had in some way contained
it before it even occurred.
That night, for the first time in years, Leon dreamed of his father. Not as he had been—a tall man
with a resonant laugh and hands that smelled of pipe tobacco—but as he might be now, aged and
diminished, sitting in a room very much like the bookstore, waiting for something that would never
arrive.
In the dream, Leon approached his father and said, “Goodbye.” The word felt foreign in his mouth,
sharp-edged and dangerous. His father looked up, startled, as if Leon had uttered not a
commonplace farewell but some arcane incantation.
“What did you say?” his father asked, his voice faint, as if coming from a great distance.
“Nothing,” Leon replied. “I said nothing at all.”
When he woke, the dream still clinging to him like cobwebs, Leon felt a sense of disquiet he
couldn’t name. He rose and dressed in the gray light of dawn, then went to the bookstore earlier
than usual, needing the comfort of his books, their contained worlds and controlled endings.
On the counter, where nothing had been the night before, he found a book. The Woman Who
Collected Goodbyes, the title read. There was no author listed. The cover was blank, a featureless
expanse of white that somehow suggested absence rather than simplicity.
Leon opened it, curious. The book had no first page, as if the beginning had been deliberately
excised. When he flipped to the end, he found only blank pages, an ending yet to be written—or
perhaps an ending that refused to be acknowledged.
He placed the book on a small wooden stand behind the counter, where he displayed rare or
unusual volumes. Then he turned the sign on the door from CLOSED to OPEN and waited, though
for what, he couldn’t have said.
2
Elya returned to Endings & Beginnings three days after her first visit, drawn back by the silent
bookseller and his strange, compelling presence. She had read the book of poetry she’d
purchased, finding in its exploration of absence an echo of her own preoccupation with departures.
The bell above the door announced her entrance, but the store appeared empty. No Leon behind
the counter, no other customers browsing the shelves. The space felt different somehow—
hollower, as if the building itself were holding its breath.
“Hello?” she called, her voice falling flat in the dusty air. No response.
She moved through the store, noting that everything seemed to be in its place—the books still on
their shelves, the reading lamps still positioned by the comfortable chairs in the corners. Yet there
was a quality of abandonment about the place, a sense that it had been empty for much longer
than a few hours or days.
When she reached the counter, she saw the TEMPORARILY CLOSED sign lying there, as if someone
had intended to hang it in the window but had been interrupted. Beside it was a book on a small
wooden stand: The Woman Who Collected Goodbyes.
Elya reached for it, drawn by the title that seemed to speak directly to her, that seemed to name
what she was in a way she had never been able to articulate herself. The cover was cool to the
touch, the absence of design or author name striking in its simplicity.
She opened the book, curious, and found that it began not with a first page but with what appeared
to be a middle chapter, as if someone had removed the beginning. The text started mid-sentence:
“…collecting them like seashells, each one unique, each one a fragment of something larger that
could never be fully reassembled.”
Elya frowned, flipping back to see if she had missed something, but there was nothing before this
fractional beginning. She turned to the end of the book, only to find blank pages, an unwritten
conclusion.
“Excuse me,” she said, louder this time, hoping that Leon might be in a back room, might emerge to
explain this strange, incomplete book. But the store remained silent, the only sound the settling of
old wood and the distant murmur of traffic from the street outside.
She placed money on the counter—more than the seventeen dollars her previous purchase had
cost, erring on the side of generosity—and took the book, feeling both like a thief and like someone
claiming what was rightfully hers.
Outside, the city continued its rhythmic life, people flowing around her as she stood on the
sidewalk, the enigmatic book clutched to her chest. She looked back at the store, at its dusty
windows and faded sign, and felt a pang of something that might have been loss, though she had
never truly possessed what she was now losing.
That night, in her apartment, Elya began to read The Woman Who Collected Goodbyes from its
truncated beginning. The story was fragmented, jumping between perspectives and timelines in a
way that should have been confusing but instead created a strange, dreamlike coherence. It told of
a woman who moved through life gathering the final moments of relationships, the last words and
gestures of people as they departed from each other’s lives.
The parallels to Elya’s own existence were too precise to be coincidental. The unnamed protagonist
shared her habit of cataloging farewells, her preoccupation with the moment of departure rather
than the duration of presence. As she read, Elya felt as if she were reading not fiction but a
distorted biography, a funhouse mirror reflection of her own life.
She read until the early hours of the morning, finally reaching the last written page. The text ended
mid-sentence, just as it had begun: “And in the end, she realized that what she had been collecting
was not the goodbyes of others, but…”
What? But what? Elya turned the page, hoping for continuation, but found only blankness. The
story, like Leon himself, refused the comfort of closure.
She returned to the bookstore the next day, and the day after that, and for a full week, each time
finding it closed, the TEMPORARILY CLOSED sign now hanging crookedly in the window. She cupped her hands around her eyes and peered through the glass, trying to see if anything had
changed inside.
The space remained as it had been—books on shelves, lamps by chairs, dust motes floating in the
beams of sunlight that penetrated the dirty windows. But something was different, something she
couldn’t quite identify. The store felt as if it had been sealed in amber, preserved but no longer
living.
On the eighth day, Elya found the door unlocked. She entered cautiously, the bell above her head
silent now, as if it too had given up on announcing arrivals and departures.
Inside, everything was as it had been, except for one thing: where Leon had stood was now a single
sheet of paper, laid precisely in the center of the counter. On it, in a handwriting both elegant and
somehow unformed, were the words:
“The end is never the end. It is always the beginning of something else.”
Elya took the paper, folded it carefully, and placed it between the pages of The Woman Who
Collected Goodbyes. Then she left the store for the last time, knowing without being told that it
would not be there if she returned, that it had served its purpose in their shared story and would
now fade like a setting from a dream upon waking.
She was right. The next day, the storefront was occupied by a chain coffee shop, as if Endings &
Beginnings had never existed at all. When she asked the barista how long the café had been there,
the young woman looked at her strangely and said, “Like, forever? At least since I was in high
school.”
But the book remained, solid and real in Elya’s hands, a tangible artifact from a place that might
never have been, given to her by a man who might never have existed.
3
Leon stood on the platform of a train station in a city whose name he had already forgotten. He
carried no luggage, only a book tucked under his arm—not The Woman Who Collected Goodbyes,
which he had left behind for Elya, but a different volume, one whose title changed depending on
who was looking at it and what they most needed to read.
The train approached, a silver blur resolving into distinct cars and windows. Leon watched it arrive
with the detached interest of someone observing a natural phenomenon—a sunset, perhaps, or
the tide coming in. He had no ticket, no destination in mind. He would simply board and see where
the journey took him.
As the train slowed to a stop, Leon saw his reflection in the polished surface of the nearest car. For
a moment, it seemed to move independently of him, turning to look at something he couldn’t see.
Then the doors opened, and the illusion was lost in the rush of disembarking passengers.
Among them was a woman who caught his attention—not because she was beautiful, though she
was, in a severe, precise way, but because she moved with the same quality of deliberate
distraction he had observed in Elya Merrick. As if she were both intensely present and
fundamentally elsewhere.
The woman approached him, stopping just close enough that he could see the flecks of gold in her
otherwise dark eyes.
“Have you ever said goodbye to anyone?” she asked, the question identical to the one Elya had
posed in the bookstore.
Leon felt a sense of déjà vu so powerful it was almost vertigo. He opened his mouth to respond—
this time, he would answer, this time he would break his lifelong pattern of avoidance—but before
he could speak, the woman smiled, shook her head slightly, and boarded the train.
Leon watched her go, the question hanging in the air between them like smoke, dissipating but
never quite disappearing. As the train pulled away, he raised his hand in farewell, the gesture
feeling both foreign and inevitable.
“Goodbye,” he said, the word strange in his mouth but necessary, somehow. “Goodbye.”
But there was no one there to hear him, only the empty platform and the receding train, carrying the
unknown woman to an unknown destination. Leon stood for a long time, watching until the train
was nothing more than a dot on the horizon, and then not even that.
Then he turned and walked away, leaving the station and the city behind, moving toward whatever
came next with the unhurried pace of someone who knows that endings are temporary and that
every farewell contains within it the seed of a new beginning.
In a different city, at the same moment, Elya Merrick opened The Woman Who Collected Goodbyes
and found that a new page had appeared where previously there had been only blankness. On it
was a single line:
“And in the end, she realized that what she had been collecting was not the goodbyes of others, but
the pieces of herself she had left behind each time someone departed.”