City of Maybe"
By Guid Fromm

Lila’s alarm went off at 6:32 AM, but the real wake-up call came from the soft glow bleeding through her curtains. New York light was different—it didn’t just shine, it buzzed, like it had a secret to tell. She cracked one eye open and smiled. Today already felt like a story waiting to happen.

By 7:15, she was on the fire escape outside her apartment in Harlem, sipping cocoa from a chipped mug that used to belong to her grandma. Below, the city pulsed. Taxi horns, dog barks, the melody of a street performer tuning his violin two blocks down. The world was waking up, and so was she.

She threw on her favorite jacket—navy blue with a constellation print on the inside lining—and headed out, her glittery sneakers tapping to the rhythm of the city. The moment her foot hit the subway platform, the wind swept her curls up like she was in a movie. She laughed and pulled out her notebook. Lila didn’t just live life—she collected it. Every detail. Every flash of magic.

8:03 AM – School, but not ordinary school.

Midtown High was in an old building with creaky floors and secret corners. Her locker squeaked like it had a soul. Her best friend Jia handed her an iced lavender latte from a café in the Village. “You’ve got ink on your cheek,” Jia said, laughing.

“Proof I’m a writer,” Lila grinned, wiping it away.
They ran through the halls like it was a runway, tossing jokes like confetti. In English, she scribbled a poem during a pop quiz. In Chemistry, she accidentally made a purple smoke cloud (that was... not the experiment). But the magic didn’t stop there.

3:47 PM – Downtown shift, reality softens.

Her after-school gig at Aurora, a tiny fashion/art zine in SoHo, felt like entering another universe. The walls were covered in collages and polaroids. The editor, a pink-haired artist named Vega, believed in “visual spells” and taught Lila how to tell stories through light and fabric.

While steaming a vintage velvet dress, Lila found a note stitched into the lining: “You are made of stardust and espresso.”Who writes things like that? She slipped it into her notebook.

Golden hour hit the city like a spell.

Walking through Greenwich Village, she saw a girl painting tiny stars on the sidewalk. A street violinist played a haunting version of Lana Del Rey. The Empire State Building lit up in lavender and gold. And in that moment, everything felt like it belonged.

7:51 PM – The surprise.

At the bodega near her building, someone tapped her shoulder. Jordan—from her English class, poetry kid, headphones always on. “Hey,” he said, awkward-cute. “I saw your poem on the wall at school. It was… like, cosmic.”

Lila’s heart did a cartwheel.
“Thanks,” she said. “It was about the city.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I figured. I wrote one too. Wanna read it?”

Just like that, they exchanged words instead of numbers. The pages of their city stories beginning to overlap.

10:04 PM – Back on the fire escape.

The moon hung low, and the skyline shimmered like a snow globe someone had shaken gently. Lila scribbled in her notebook by fairy lights, her fingers smudged with ink and magic.

She wrote:

“The city gave me a poem, a boy with constellation eyes, and a hundred untold stories today. Maybe tomorrow it’ll give me wings.”

And maybe it would.