The story of a building
Theofanis Papadopoulos had seen a lot during the thirty three years he had spent in the United States, but there was only one story he would make sure to tell his grandchildren and possible grand-grand-children and actually everybody else who was willing to listen and deemed worthy enough; it was the story of the building across the street from his small family restaurant in a nice little neighborhood in a big city on the East Coast of America…
It was a Monday, when he first saw the two women walking by on the other side of the street, one blonde, the other one brunette, casually holding hands and talking.
He observed them from behind his counter and noticed that they were checking out the building on the other side of the intersection that had been up for sale for the last ten years. A rundown one-story house that used to be the salesroom of the adjoining boot factory, which had been turned into a loft building several years prior.
The dark haired one seemed more enthusiastic about the premises than her blond counterpart, but nonetheless they both crossed the street and came over to his restaurant.
"Hey," the Latina said and gave him a wide smile, "I'm sorry, but can you tell me who I have to contact to buy the building across the street?"
That was the day he first met Santana Lopez and Quinn Fabray.
A few weeks later he watched the two of them begin renovating the whole building in order to turn it into an art gallery, Santana´s new place of work. He even helped them paint the outside walls and always made sure they had enough to eat and drink (they both were way too skinny in his opinion).
They were so in love with each other that sometimes just looking at them interact made him blush slightly, but they never noticed, neither his blush nor that he was watching them now and again; always too busy loving each other.
During those first weeks he might have seen them being intimate one night, though he swears he looked away as soon as possible. Honestly.
Even though he didn't realize it that time, he saw them the night they broke up, a few blissful months after they had bought the house.
It was late already and he was just about to close the restaurant for the day, when he heard loud voices coming from the building across the street. As always the door to the gallery stood open and through the big glass windows at the corner he could see Santana and Quinn fighting. That alone wasn't unusual; he had witnessed quite a few arguments between the two of them, one time someone had even called the police, but no matter how heated their argument was they never just turned around and left. They always fought out their differences and made up before the day was over.
Only this time– they didn't.
Quinn stalked out of the building and towards her car with Santana following closely behind, shouting at her not to run away.
But Quinn did and what either of them probably didn't know at that moment in time, was that she wouldn't come back the next day or the day after.
The thing was: she wasn't going to come back. Period.
It took Santana three weeks to realize that.
Six weeks to accept it.
And seven weeks after Quinn had left, the first letter appeared.
At first they were barely noticeable, a bunch of papers glued to the front of the building, and Theofanis had thought they were merely flyers someone had put up there until his daughter told him one day that they were love letters, all addressed to Quinn.
That was the beginning.
And for the next three years he watched silently as Santana lived her life, never talking more than a few words to him, and religiously sticking a new letter to the outer wall of her gallery every single day.
On some days, he noticed, there were only a couple of words on a post-it, on others a few hundred written in tiny letters, but never more than one page, one post-it, in all the colors of the rainbow…
After a few months he noticed that other people had begun to put up their own love letters on the east wall of the building. It wasn't new to him that people who walked by suddenly stopped to read the letters someone they didn't know had put on a wall in an unremarkable street, all addressed to Q. He even knew that some of the residents of the street had made it a daily ritual to stop by the gallery to read the next chapter of a story they´d probably never fully understand. But strangers beginning to write their own stories? That was new.
Over time he often saw Santana sitting on the curb, staring up into the sky, a beer or wine bottle her only companion.
Sometimes just looking at her made him all melancholy.
On those days he went home early and told his wife that he loved her and before he went to sleep he silently thanked God for letting him meet her and prayed for Santana to find a way out of her misery.
Santana stayed at the gallery most of the day, often late into the night, writing, reading or preparing the next exhibitions, sometimes talking to someone on the phone, or eating with a friend, though he only ever saw her with tall blonde or a guy with broad shoulders and a ridiculous hair cut.
For some reason Theofanis never really thought of her actions as romantic.
He watched her put up love letters everyday for several months and it never seemed like some grand gesture, a ritual maybe, but not a romantic sign. He figured it was therapeutic for her, or even some kind of art project, an everyday thing, not something special. But then again maybe that was what made it special, that she did it always, not just once to impress someone and rekindle a relationship. No, she did it every day, and probably more for herself than for the person those letters were actually addressed to.
The reason he thought so was because he had met her and he knew Santana Lopez good enough to know that she was not a very romantic person, really, actually she was everything but.
His seventeen year old daughter sighed and turned back towards him. "That´s soooo sweet and heartbreaking at the same time... Do you think she´ll ever come back?" She asked him and he didn't understand at first.
"Who?"
"Quinn," Anastasia replied, rolling her eyes (something, which Theofanis was sure of) she had picked up from Santana.
He didn't know, but despite not really knowing either of those two women very well he hoped that some day she would.
He didn't know their back-story, didn't know whether or not they grew up together, whether they met in high school or college, how long they'd been together before he first saw them that day, which felt like forever ago.
He didn't know why they broke up, whether it was over something stupid or with good reason, whether Santana maybe brought her misery upon herself, or if Quinn had simply broken her heart.
He didn't know any of this, but he did know that he wanted Santana to find happiness again, because he was one of those fools who wanted everybody to be happy in life.
Anastasia spent a lot of her free time over at the gallery with Santana and sometimes went to see the exhibitions with her friends, though she mostly preferred to go alone.
Afterward she would always be hyped and go on and on about how great her night had been and how cool Santana was.
Theofanis figured that a little crush on the woman across the street (who was so obviously still hung up on someone else) was better than an affair with a boy who drove a motorbike, so he let her ramble on while she waited tables, and continued reading his paper in silence.
A few days before Christmas one year Santana told him that she found a letter, taped to the entrance door of the gallery, from someone called Rose, telling her that she should forget about Quinn and marry her instead.
She never called Rose, but the note did make her laugh and she painfully realized that she couldn't go on like this forever. That she probably couldn't spent another three years like that, writing letters, wallowing in self-pity, pining after someone who had left her so long ago.
It was just another Friday night, when Theofanis heard tires squeak from a full braking on the street and for a second he thought that there had been an accident on the intersection in front of his restaurant. But when he looked up, he only saw one of those shiny black cars standing solely in the middle of the street.
His interest peaked; he watched a woman with dark sunglasses get out of the car, leaving the door open, and walk towards the building across from his. Her body language told him that she was shocked, amazed and probably a little overwhelmed at what she saw in front of her.
"You´re back for her, are you not?" He asked her once she had sat down at the bar half an hour later.
All Quinn could do was nod.
"A thousand and ninety six love letters written to you."
After three years Santana had given up on waiting and had moved away, though she did keep the building and left the letters behind, clearly still not ready to completely let go off the love that had defined her life for so long.
Quinn ordered a handful of ouzos and downed the first two within seconds.
Not quite ten months after Santana had went away Quinn had finally come back, but instead of finding the person she obviously still loved she found three years of written love in the one place she was sure to see Santana again, to find herself again.
It was already dark outside by the time Quinn left the restaurant, more than a little buzzed, but not quite drunk.
She took a seat on the sidewalk at the corner and stared at the other building, still torn between being amazed and absolutely overwhelmed. The neon signs Santana had put up a month before she went away were glowing in a bright red and Quinn had a hard time trying not to cry.
"She left. But if you want you can rent the premises, only condition is you leave the façade the way it is," Theofanis told her standing behind her. He had never been good at comforting people, but he thought she might like to know that she had the possibility to at least be close to Santana in that way.
A month later she moved in with her communication design agency and four employees, none of them questioning her motives.
Theofanis often saw Quinn sitting outside of the building, much the same Santana always had, staring at the wall and reading some of the letters.
At first just one at a time, and mostly those from people she didn't know. Then one day she began to read the ones addressed to her, sometimes spending long hours outside reading.
He helped her set up the ladder when she was done with the ones she could read while still standing on the ground. He didn't say anything to her about the letters, or her relationship with Santana, but he did give her an understanding and warm smile before leaving her alone again.
Sometimes she ate her lunch on the ladder, going through page after page, sometimes rereading a particular letter several times.
In all the years that had passed since Santana had put up the first letter Theofanis had never read any of them, for some reason he still considered them to be private, despite the fact that they were put on a wall in public, for everybody to see.
Maybe he was the romantic fool for thinking that only the people those letters were written to should read them, but so be it.
On some days he saw Quinn cry.
Tears of regret, of sadness.
Crying for a lost love.
Desperate because Santana wasn't there. Wasn't where she had left her.
Not even Kurt, one of her employees and former classmates, and at the same time one of her best friends (who talked way too much in Theofanis opinion) could bring comfort to her on those days. All he could do was hold her while she wept bitterly and hope that Santana would come back someday.
Anastasia got to know Quinn like she did Santana and for weeks she spoke of nothing but those two, how they were perfect for each other, how she couldn't believe they didn't stay together, how they should get a second chance.
Santana was always a little embarrassed when people talked about it being such a romantic thing to do. But the truth was, she didn't do it to be romantic, she did it because she simply wasn't capable of not doing it.
She told Theofanis once that she knew what she was doing was kind of stupid and senseless, but that she didn't regret doing it, because somehow her little gallery had become a place people associated with love, and that somehow had turned out to be good for the business and on some level even better for herself.
He knew that Steven McMillan, a private investigator who lived in the building right next to the restaurant, had been trying to track down Santana to make her come back, to tell her that Quinn was there, waiting, but even he couldn't find her.
All he found out was that she had left the country.
Quinn was more talkative than Santana, she engaged people in conversations, found friends, she even moved into an apartment at the end of the block so that she could walk to work and always see her personal kind-of-Taj Mahal.
But just like Santana she always stayed alone, not once even thinking about someone else, about giving up for good.
The day Santana came back wasn't anything special, it was cloudy and just warm enough to go outside in a t-shirt. Theofanis saw her slowly walk up to the building she still owned as far as he knew; she still looked the same. A smile appeared on her face once she realized that the walls were still the way she had left them, a glowing declaration of love.
"Bye Theo," Quinn called to him when she left his restaurant and though he will never admit it, he followed her outside, too curious to see what would happen to stay behind his counter.
He pretended to clean the windows while he kept eyes and ears on the two women, who at this moment were still unaware of each other.
They both stopped dead in tracks once they noticed one another and Theofanis was sure that all three of them were holding their breath at that very instant.
Just a few seconds later the shock wore off and he could see Santana take a few steps closer to the person she had spent so many written words on, so many sleepless nights.
He couldn't hear what was being said, but they didn't scream or cry, neither did they touch nor kiss. That's not how things went with the lovers in those movies his wife loved to watch. Did these two learn nothing from Hollywood? he asked himself.
They talked for a few minutes and then Santana went back the way she came and Quinn walked into her office, neither one looking back.
Well, that was certainly not the big reconciliation he had expected after long years of longing.
What he had just witnessed was actually rather disappointing, but then again who was he to judge?
Theofanis Papadopoulos might or might not have cried a little for the first time since leaving Greece so many years ago, when he saw them coming down the street hand in hand one day several weeks later.
He stopped what he was doing and leaned on the counter, watching them like a thirteen-year-old watches the guy finally smooch the girl at the end of a romantic comedy.
And just like in the movies, Santana kissed her lover goodbye for the day; kissed her like Quinn was a sailor about to leave her again for months instead of merely a few short hours.
But the blonde obviously liked it. With a beaming smile she lastly pushed her girlfriend (again at last her girlfriend) away after a few minutes and entered her office (ignoring the smirks her employees were sporting).
Waving at Kurt and winking one last time at Quinn, Santana then turned around and left, letting the blonde get to work for a few hours before it was time to (finally) pick her up again.
Anastasia was ecstatic when she found out they were together again and she swore to herself that she would never settle for a love less perfect than theirs.
Theofanis didn't think that their love was greater than any other kind of love, but that didn't mean it was any less special.
However he didn't dare tell that to his daughter, since he wouldn't mind her staying single till her early thirties or maybe even longer. (Despite being a hopeless romantic, he was after all, a father.)
Just like they had those first few months after they had bought the building across the street, Santana and Quinn started to spend their lunch breaks together again. Every day at one-thirty they walked out of the office and got something to eat. Then they went to sit on the roof of their house, if the weather allowed it or stayed inside the restaurant, talking to Theofanis or sometimes other people, depending on who was there, simply content to be together again, to catch up on all the time they lost.
He smiled when one morning he got to his restaurant and saw the small poster in the window of the building he had spend so many hours looking at each day for the last three decades.
We´re getting married; stood there in messy letters, black on white, nothing fancy, just a message. To let the people living on the street, the people who knew their story and had become their friends, know that they had finally gotten it right; that there was still hope for the rest of them, as Anastasia had put it.
He smiled to himself and went inside his restaurant, serving out free ouzo to all the regulars and inhabitants of the street for the rest of day in celebration.
Over the next days there appeared congratulation notes on the windows and for the first time in over five years even Theofanis himself wrote a few lines on a piece of paper and stuck it to the door.
The engagement party was held at the office and his restaurant and people wandered about, walking back and forth across the street. Everybody they knew (and a lot of people they didn't know) was happy for them. And Theofanis could honestly say that he hadn't seen many people in his life being as happy and in love as they were that day.
Many of the attendees told them how they had fallen in love with their story; how they wished they were part of a modern fairy-tale like theirs, but Theofanis wasn't one of them. Unlike most of the people he hadn't forgotten that those years they didn't spend together were lonely and painful for the two of them and that they would probably gladly give up their romantic story if they could get back the time they lost in return.
And that was why -even though nobody died- Theofanis couldn't help but think of their story as a little bit tragic, because he would have hated to have lost just a single day with his wife, and they had lost years.
A few months and a wedding later Theofanis saw light on top of the office when he closed the restaurant and he could hear people talking and laughing on the roof.
On the last free wall stood, painted in big bold letters:
There are 1843 love letters on these walls and 2.984264786% of them are written by me for you. This will be the last and it contains just one significant question: Will you marry me, Tina?
Theofanis knew Tina, just like he knew anybody else living on the street. She was a mathematician who had moved into an apartment three floors above the restaurant just three months earlier and therewith had a perfect view of the other building.
He could hear Santana complain about the whole thing being totally lame and corny, to which Quinn could only reply Look who´s talking! (he had actually thought the same).
Smiling to himself he waved at the two of them when they noticed him and then continued his way home.
One day in May the following year they began to take the letters down. The weather and the time had left their traces and despite them being laminated some had suffered greatly.
They took them down with care, not wanting to destroy any and put each and every one of them in an album.
When Anastasia found out that they still had them and even let people read them, she was out of the restaurant within seconds and across the street.
She spent every afternoon at Quinn´s office for weeks, probably reading each and every letter, even those she had already read years before.
She even wrote a paper about the building, the letters and the people for one of her classes in college and got an A.
Just like Anastasia, everybody in the neighborhood and regular customers of the restaurant knew the story of the building with the love letters and Santana and Quinn. And people from elsewhere who had heard of it often asked Theofanis about them, about the letters, whether she really put them up on her own, only one at a time, every day for three long years, if he knew why they took them down.
Some he told that they could take a look at how it used to be and read the letters in the office across the street, where Quinn and Santana showed them to everyone who wanted to see; some of them he told he didn't know much about it.
When one day much later letters started to appear again he couldn't help but smile to himself.
He saw Santana and Quinn standing on the sidewalk in front of their building, Santana scratching her head, obviously contemplating what to do, and Quinn standing next to her with her arms crossed and an amused smile on her lips. (He was pretty sure she wasn't looking at the new letters, but rather at the behind of her wife.)
The next day Santana started repainting the wall, drawing a giant envelope on it, and put up a mail box on the outside of the building (later people from far away would start sending letters addressed to Letters to Q and Jonathan, their mailman would always deliver them with a beaming smile). At the same time a guy with a Mohawk Theofanis had seen around quite a few times installed TV screens hanging in some of the windows.
A few days later he found out that they took the love letters, scanned them in and displayed them on the TV screens (and as Anastasia had told him published them on a website) which he figured made sense.
They still kept the originals and people were always welcome to come in and read them or share their own stories.
Theofanis Papadopoulos still sees Santana and Quinn Fabray every day, working or talking, every so often kissing.
On the way home, always hand in hand or arm in arm, they wave at him, before walking those few hundred yards to their shared home, their personal happy-ending.
And for years to come, that he´s sure of, the big neon letters on top of the building across from his restaurant will shine every night, reminding people of love and second chances.
A/N: The title is taken from a Terra Naomi song, which I constantly listened to while writing this. Also the characters don´t belong to me and the whole story was inspired by a photograph which I don´t own either.
As usual: Comments are love. :)