Noé

Name: My name is Noé Laurent.

Alias: Most people just call me Noé. Some customers at the café call me L’oiseau — the little bird — because I move quietly and because I watch more than I speak. I never told them to stop.

Age: I’m twenty-five.

Birthday: I was born on the 9th of December. Winter has always felt like home to me, maybe because I arrived with it.

Sexuality: I am a man who loves men. I don’t dress it up with prettier words anymore.

Gender: I’m male.

Pronouns: He / Him. Though I suppose I would answer to anything said gently.

Species: Human — flawed, restless, learning.

Nationality: French. Even if Paris still feels like something I am trying to earn.

Disabilities: My eyesight is terrible without my glasses — the world becomes a blur of colors and shapes, like a painting left out in the rain. I suppose I’ve learned to find poetry in that, too.

Mental Disorders: I live with anxiety. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind that sits right behind the heart, whispering you will ruin this even when nothing has gone wrong. Sometimes it’s manageable. Sometimes it isn’t.

I move quietly through the world, though not out of shyness—more out of habit. I observe before I speak. I listen more than I explain. I care deeply, more deeply than I let people see, because care can become a tether, and I am afraid of holding people too tightly.

When I love, I do so slowly, as if I am unwrapping something fragile. But I also love wholly. It is my greatest strength and my worst flaw.

I overthink. I worry. I imagine everything that could go wrong, as if anticipation could protect me from pain. It never does.

But I feel deeply, and I notice things others overlook—a trembling in someone’s voice, the way their hands move when they’re trying not to break. I store small details the way others collect photographs.

I want to be braver than I am. I think I will be, someday. I am learning.

I am not remarkable at first glance. I’ve always known that and it doesn’t bother me. My hair is dark—brown, though sometimes it looks almost black when it’s wet. It curls a little at the ends when I let it grow out, which I rarely do. I push it back when I’m nervous; I don’t realize I’m doing it until someone points it out.

My eyes are also brown, but a lighter, warmer shade—like tea left to steep too long. They give me away too easily. I’ve never learned how to hide what I feel, not really. I wear glasses most days; without them everything softens into suggestion rather than detail.

I’m neither tall nor short. Somewhere in the middle. I have the kind of build you get from carrying plates and coffee trays rather than going to the gym. My posture is a bit folded inward, like I’m always preparing for something I cannot name.

Most of my clothes are simple. Soft sweaters, shirts worn thin at the collar, coats that hold the scent of roasted coffee. I like fabrics that don’t demand attention.

I do not think I am beautiful. But I know I am gentle to look at. And sometimes, that is enough.

I was born in a town that people do not remember unless they were forced to grow up there. Grey winters, narrow streets, old stones that only looked beautiful in the rain. My family wasn’t unhappy, just tired. My father worked early, came home late, fell asleep in the same chair every night. My mother laughed softly when she was sad, which was often. I learned very young that silence can be a kindness, and also a punishment.

I didn’t speak much as a child. I watched. I listened. I memorized the way light moved across faces, how voices changed depending on who they were spoken to. I think I was always trying to understand how love worked—not the dramatic kind people write music about, but the quiet kind, the one that shows itself in the way someone sets a cup on the table or sighs after coming through the door.

When I was old enough, I left home for Paris. I told everyone it was for school. Maybe that was true at first. But really, I left because I needed air. I needed to see if I could become someone different in a city that did not already know me. Paris does not care who you were before you arrive. That indifference felt like mercy.

I began working in a café. At first to pay rent, then… it became something else. Something I didn’t expect. There is a rhythm to it—steam hissing, cups clinking, strangers exchanging fragments of their lives without knowing they’re being witnessed. I liked that. I liked the anonymity and the intimacy happening together, in the same breath.

That is where I learned how to speak again, slowly, like thawing after winter.

And then I met you.

Not all at once. Not with fireworks or destiny or any of those stories we are fed to believe love should look like. No, it was quieter. You came often. You smiled in a way that made the world feel less heavy. You remembered small things about me. You looked at me like I was present, even on days where I did not feel like I was fully in my body.

We were gentle at first. Careful. Like handling something fragile.

But I was still carrying pieces of the life I came from. The silence, the hesitation, the fear that love would eventually tire and fall asleep in an armchair without realizing it had grown old. I did not want to become my parents’ sad kind of familiar.

So when things grew close—when I felt myself held too warmly, seen too clearly—I panicked. I withdrew. I told you I needed time. I told you I was overwhelmed, confused, that I didn’t know what I wanted.

The truth is: I did know. I wanted you. And I was terrified of wanting you.

I told myself I needed to protect you from my uncertainty. But maybe I was just protecting myself from the possibility of being loved and then losing it.

Now I walk the city thinking about the moment I stepped backward instead of forward. And every quiet street, every reflection in a café window, every song drifting out of someone’s headphones reminds me of you—of what I still carry, and what I left in your hands.