Someone was here. That's really all we know.

A coffee cup sits on a park bench. Whoever bought it, carried it here, and sat beside it is gone. But for a little while, this bench was part of someone's day.

Maybe they stopped here before work. Maybe they were waiting for someone. Maybe they received good news. Maybe they were avoiding a challenging conversation at work. Or maybe they simply drank a cup of coffee.

We'll never know.

There's something interesting about arriving just after someone else's moment has ended. An empty chair after a meeting. Reading glasses resting on an open book. A coffee cup left on a bench.

We see what remains. We don't see what happened.

And yet, all around us are small pieces of evidence that other people's lives have been unfolding in the very places we're moving through. For a few minutes, this bench mattered to someone we'll probably never meet.

Now we're the ones passing by.

How might we treat each other differently if we remembered how much of one another's story we never get to see?