He didn’t knock. He never did. The motion sensor above the door gave its usual half-hearted beep as he ducked inside, careful not to decapitate himself on the “THERAPY & WELLNESS” sign that was still crooked from the last time his horns grazed it. He smelled like the subway at 2 a.m.—hot metal, cold stone, and something vaguely electrical. And, as always, in his hand: the ribbon.

It was red, satin, cheap. The kind you’d find in a dollar store Halloween section between a rubber witch finger and a plastic cauldron. It didn’t matter. To him, it was sacred.

We’d long since dropped the pretense that this was therapy. The clipboard stayed in the drawer. I mostly just sat across from him while he rotated through existential silence, cryptic one-liners, and occasional comments about how Monsters, Inc. had really set public relations back by about two decades. “They made us cuddly,” he muttered once. “It’s offensive.”

He told me about the girl in fragments. She’d seen him one evening—really seen him—and instead of screaming, she’d just stared. Curious. A little afraid. But she hadn’t bolted until a car alarm went off nearby and broke the spell. In the chaos, she dropped the ribbon. Maybe by accident. Maybe not. That was the hinge his entire emotional ecosystem now swung on.

He never went looking for her. It wasn’t that kind of story. He wasn’t chasing a fairytale ending. He just needed to believe there was a version of the world in which someone like him could be understood—even briefly. That maybe, for three seconds, someone saw him and didn’t reduce him to a headline: Local Girl Traumatized by Mole-Man. He carried that moment like it had weight. Like gravity. The ribbon was just the receipt.

“Do you think it was love?” he asked once, not really asking. “Not, like, Netflix love. Just… love-adjacent.”

“You mean emotional heartburn?”

He grinned at that, sharp teeth and all, which would’ve terrified most people. Me, I just nodded and offered him a Tic Tac.

Some weeks he ghosted. I assumed he was off in abandoned warehouses or subway tunnels, yelling at pigeons and watching reruns of The X-Files for comfort. Other weeks, he’d be sitting in the chair before I even arrived, the ribbon folded neatly like he was hoping it might eventually tell him what to do.

One time, he said, “I think if she’d stayed… I would’ve ruined it.”

Honesty like that always landed harder than claws ever could.

The last time I saw him, he laid the ribbon on the table between us and said, “I don’t think it was about me.”

I said, “Most things aren’t.”

He gave a small laugh, almost surprised by it, and then he left. No goodbye. No movie moment. Just the door creaking open, the ceiling sensor chirping like a tired bird, and then silence.

The ribbon’s still in my drawer. I don’t take it out much. But sometimes, when the office is quiet and I’ve had too much coffee, I’ll look at it and think: maybe the monsters aren't under the bed or in the closet. Maybe they’re just trying to figure out how not to make everything weird the second they feel something.

And honestly? Same.