Even after eight years, I didn’t know his name. It was only his portrait I recognized in the obituaries, a portrait of the crinkled face with those dark eyes sunken in, a portrait of the days spent in the futile search for something more. 
I didn’t know his name, but I saw him daily at the coffee shop—rain or shine, holiday or not. So when he didn’t appear in the coffee shop on December 14 for the first time in eight years, I knew something was wrong.
I awoke every day precisely at 5:00 am, when the night still shrouded the city in void. I was an writer, after all, and throughout the years, I had realized that the words flowed more freely in the early hours of dawn, despite the toll that such a habit often took on my health. But I never could say that I was the earliest riser. For whenever I opened the shutters and peered onto the streets, the light morning breezes rippling through my hair, I spotted him hunched along the sidewalk with a tin cup and newspaper. He was earlier. Without fail.
He played nightly on the grand piano at the coffee shop on the next boulevard. I saw him every day as I spent hours in there gazing out the window and writing. I believe that was how he sustained himself. His stained jeans and weather-beaten skin marked the life of a man who spent the nights on the streets, but he possessed a certain kind of professionalism and musicality absent in amateurs. And so, he became the inspiration for my first short story.
It was fiction. With my own liberty of pen and paper, I began to spin the story. His name was David. He had underwent musical training but had been unable to snatch a position in the professional performing world, so he became a homeless man with only the minimum wage job of playing the piano in the coffee shop.
I wrote, yet I never considered asking him about his own life. I assured myself that there was no need, that he was simply the inspiration, that the story was not meant to be factually centered on him. There didn’t seem to be any other possibilities. After all, why would he sleep on the streets if he had a home?
But as I clutched the newspapers in my hands now, I saw how wrong I was.
He was a Juilliard pianist, and had received recognition at the school for exceptionality. He married, had a daughter. But then, he and his wife had split up. The house had gone to his wife. Too proud to continue living under her roof, he had opted for the streets.
He had died from the cold.
I traced my fingers across his name. Jeff Steen. It wasn’t David, as I had imagined him, as I had written in my story.
I glanced down at my notebook, with the pages and pages of stories I had written, painting him as a man forced into homelessness with no other choice. But he had a choice. The story wasn’t right.
Slowly, I reached for the pages and began to tear them off of the binding. I allowed the pieces to flutter into the trashcan at my bedside.
Then, glancing out the window, at the exact spot where I would have seen him sitting before dawn any other day, I began again.