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It’s 2:03 AM. The city is asleep, except for the dogs, the auto drivers on night shift, and me — standing outside a tiny roadside tea stall that looks like it hasn’t passed a health inspection since independence.

The chaiwala doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t need to. He makes the kind of tea that forces silence out of you anyway — perfectly scalding, overly sweet, with just enough ginger to punch you in the throat and remind you that you’re alive.

There’s something sacred about drinking chai at this hour. You’re too tired to pretend, too awake to sleep, and too caffeinated to think clearly. The usual categories of your life — work, relationships, ambition, rent — all blur into the steam rising from a cracked glass.

Tonight, I share the stall with a man in a security guard uniform, a kid with blue hair and headphones bigger than his head, and someone who might be a delivery driver or a poet or both. Nobody asks. There’s an unspoken agreement: no past, no future, only hot tea and the hum of sodium streetlights.

The security guard tells a story about catching two cats fighting in the building basement. The blue-haired kid snorts. The poet/delivery guy mutters something about reincarnation. It all makes perfect sense. Or none at all. But it doesn’t matter. At 2 AM, even nonsense feels profound.

When I finally walk back home, the air is cooler, and the world seems lighter. Not because anything changed, but because for ten minutes, nothing needed to. No productivity hacks, no to-do lists, no philosophical podcasts. Just chai, strangers, and silence.

Maybe that’s the meaning of life.

Or maybe I just need to sleep.

There’s a bench in the corner of Lincoln Park, nestled between a lonely oak and an indifferent drinking fountain. I sit there often. Not because the view is great (it’s not), or because it’s peaceful (it’s usually not), but because it’s the kind of place that doesn’t ask for much. A place that exists just to exist—like me on most Thursdays.

Last week, someone left a paperback on the bench. The Stranger by Camus. Fitting, I thought. I flipped through the dog-eared pages and found a note on the inside cover:
“Return to Bench 17 when you’re ready.”
No name. No date. No hint if it was a joke or a social experiment or something else entirely.

Of course, there’s no Bench 17. The city, in its infinite municipal wisdom, only numbered up to 12. But now I’m stuck thinking about it. Every time I pass a new bench, I check. Maybe they restarted numbering. Maybe it’s in another park. Maybe it’s just metaphorical nonsense and I’m being played by a stranger who understands human curiosity better than I’d like to admit.

But that’s the thing about benches: they’re patient. They don’t mind if you sit for five minutes or two hours. They’ve seen first dates, bad breakups, teenagers vaping with exaggerated nonchalance, old men feeding pigeons with a seriousness reserved for funerals. And once, apparently, a philosophical scavenger hunt.

Sometimes I think about leaving a note of my own. Maybe inside a copy of The Trial. Something Kafkaesque, cryptic, irresistible. But I never do. I’m not ready to let the bench be the storyteller. Not yet.

So I keep showing up. I sit. I watch. I wonder. And the bench? It listens, quietly collecting secrets, shoes, shadows, and the occasional paperback with just enough mystery to keep a stranger coming back.