Some people stay with you like a scar. Some like a whisper. Elara was both.
—
They say memory is a trick of the mind.
A lie we whisper to ourselves over time until it sounds like truth.
I never believed that.
Not until the day it rained the wrong way.
I remember waking up that morning with the vague heaviness I'd come to recognize—not quite grief, not quite anxiety, just a slow dull ache that settled into the bones. Like waking up underwater. I made my coffee the way I always did, letting the machine cough and wheeze until it gave me something warm enough to pretend I was alive. I ate nothing. Brushed my teeth without looking in the mirror. Left the apartment wearing the same coat I'd worn every day that week. No real destination. Just work. Just Tuesday.
Except it wasn't.
The world outside had slipped—almost imperceptibly—out of its usual rhythm.
It wasn't just the light, though that was the first thing I noticed. The sky was split cleanly in two. To the east, clouds hung like torn smoke, low and pregnant with thunder. To the west, there was a sharp, dying gold, like the sun had spilled its blood along the rooftops. The air was heavy, expectant, but it didn't smell like rain. It smelled sterile, like a waiting room or a hospital corridor. Too clean.
And then it started to rain.
But not down.
The droplets rose from the asphalt like steam, climbing past my shoes, curling around ankles, drifting upward into the air like ghosts being recalled to wherever they'd escaped from. I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, blinking at the wet that shimmered on the pavement—yet felt no moisture on my skin.
Around me, people did what people always do when something unexplainable happens. They ignored it.
They ducked into cafés, pulled out umbrellas that remained inexplicably dry, tapped away on their phones as if nothing had shifted. As if gravity hadn't just turned traitor.
That's when I saw her.
Standing still at a bus stop like she'd been there forever, waiting for a world that no longer followed the rules.
She wore a yellow raincoat. Not the bright, cheerful kind you see in children's books. It was mustard-colored and too big for her, like it belonged to someone she'd lost. The sleeves dangled over her hands, and the hood was shoved down around her shoulders like a cloak, exposing tangled dark hair, the ends of which dripped as though she'd just come out of a lake.
She held a book.
Upside down.
She read with complete stillness, as if unaware—or simply uninterested—that the world around her had gone wrong. Her knees were tucked together slightly, one foot turned in. She looked fragile, not in a breakable way, but in the way an old photograph feels fragile. Like too much attention might erase her.
Something in me shifted.
I wasn't late. I wasn't early. I wasn't even supposed to be on that street. I'd taken a wrong turn—I remember that now. I'd meant to go down Clark Avenue, but I crossed over to Elder Street instead. A momentary distraction. A song I didn't remember playing in my earbuds. That's all it took.
I stood there and stared at her like a fool.
She didn't look up at first. Her eyes tracked the words—wrong side up, backwards, incomprehensible. But then, slowly, she raised her gaze.
Her eyes—gray like wet concrete, flecked with something colder—met mine.
And something inside me… jolted.
Not fear. Not attraction. Something older. Like recognition at a molecular level. Like a tuning fork ringing in my chest, awakened by a note I'd never heard before but had always known existed.
And then she spoke.
"You're late," she said.
I blinked. My throat tightened. "I'm sorry… do I know you?"
"Not yet," she said, flipping the book right-side up with a casual flick of her fingers—still without looking away from me.
Her voice didn't tease. It wasn't flirtatious or cryptic or mocking. It was simply… certain.
I should have walked away. That would've been the sensible thing. Normal people don't talk like that. Normal girls don't read invisible books in broken weather. But something had cracked open inside me. A long-closed door that creaked faintly on its rusted hinges.
I sat beside her on the bench, not sure if I was acting out of free will or gravity of a different kind.
She didn't move.
"What are you reading?" I asked.
She glanced at the pages. "A book about forgetting," she said. "Each time you turn the page, the one before it disappears. By the end, you've forgotten the beginning. You can't even remember if it was a story at all."
"That sounds… cruel."
She shrugged. "Maybe. But it's honest. Most stories lie to us. They pretend things make sense in the end."
Her voice wasn't dramatic, but it had weight. A softness that felt old, like water smoothing a stone. And there was something about the way she spoke—like someone remembering more than she was saying. Like she had lived through more than her body should allow.
I didn't ask for her name.
I didn't have to.
It drifted into my mind like a leaf landing on still water.
Elara.
Elara Morrin.
I'd never heard it before. But it felt like a name I'd tried to remember for years, only to forget again each time it slipped off my tongue.
We sat in silence. Not the awkward kind, but something deeper. I didn't check my phone. She didn't check hers. The bus never came.
And then she stood.
No goodbye. No explanation.
Just stood, tugged the sleeves of the coat a little tighter around her wrists, and walked down the street toward a corner I'd never noticed before. When I followed the line of her movement, I found nothing familiar. The street bent slightly wrong. The horizon blurred.
I didn't chase her.
Even now, I can't explain why.
—
That night, I tried to write about her.
I don't write, not really. I hadn't touched my journal in months. But something about her—itched inside me. Not like a memory, more like a splinter I couldn't see but couldn't ignore.
I sat at my desk, staring at the page. The pen trembled in my hand. Every time I tried to describe her, the words collapsed. I couldn't capture the weight of that moment, the strange ache her presence had left behind.
All I managed to write, scrawled in the dead center of the page, was a single word:
YESTERDAY.
—
The next morning, I left early.
Pressed shirt. Clean pants. I even shaved. I stood at the same stop. Same time. Same light.
She wasn't there.
She wasn't there the day after either. Or the day after that.
I started carrying a yellow raincoat in my bag. I don't know why. Maybe some part of me thought I could offer it back. As if it would make her real again. As if she'd ever been mine to find.
I asked around—carefully, cautiously, not wanting to sound unwell. Described her to the man at the flower stall. To the girl who always fed pigeons near the bench. To a college student sketching the sky in charcoal.
No one had seen her.
I walked into bookstores, dozens of them, describing the strange book. The one that forgets itself.
Most clerks shrugged. One laughed, said that sounded like half the fiction section.
Eventually, I stopped asking.
But I didn't stop remembering.
Because you can't unmeet someone like her.
—
Years passed.
I moved apartments. Changed jobs. I dated—a little. One girl wore sunflower perfume and sang Billie Holiday while cooking pasta. Another collected postcards she never mailed. They were kind. But I wasn't present. Not really. Some part of me was still sitting on that bench, listening for the sound of her voice.
I began therapy.
Started taking pills. The kind that make things less sharp. That take the color out of nightmares, the ache out of silence.
But they didn't take her.
Every yellow coat on the street made me stop. Every upside-down book caught my breath. Every girl with quiet, storm-gray eyes forced my heart to stutter.
Was it her?
Or was it just my loneliness giving strangers her face?
—
I said her name for the first time in therapy.
It was my fourth session with Dr. Felton. A small man with eyes like a foggy window and a voice you could mistake for silence.
"And who is Elara?" he asked.
I hesitated. The air felt too thin. "I don't know," I said, throat tightening. "Maybe… no one. Maybe a dream I forgot to stop believing in."
He looked at me gently. "Or someone real you made yourself forget."
I didn't respond.
Because if she were real…
Wouldn't someone else remember her?
—
That night, I went home and opened the cupboard above the sink, reaching for a glass.
Instead, I found a piece of folded paper.
I didn't put it there.
I live alone. I check my doors. I don't miss things like that.
It was folded perfectly in half. Blank on the outside. I opened it slowly, hands suddenly numb.
Inside, in handwriting that was unmistakably my own, were four words:
Don't forget me again.
But the ink was blue.
I only own black pens.
⸻
To be continued…
And remembered.