You don't lose people like Elara.
You just wake up one day and realize they were never really there.
—
I woke up before the sun.
The kind of waking that doesn't come with alarm clocks or dreams—just a sudden, sharp awareness. As if something had been watching me sleep and chose that moment to vanish.
For a second, I thought I was still dreaming. The sheets were twisted around me, sweat cooling on my neck, and a dull ache was growing behind my left eye. I reached under the pillow, searching for something—what, I didn't know—and my fingers brushed against paper.
The note.
Don't forget me again.
I held it in my hands like something sacred and dangerous at once. The creases were soft now, as if I'd folded and unfolded it a hundred times. But I hadn't.
Or maybe I had.
That word—again—dug its claws into me.
Again meant history.
Again meant failure.
Again meant that once, I had already let her slip through the cracks of my mind—and something, someone, was trying to stop it from happening a second time.
The handwriting was undeniably mine. The letters curved the way mine did. The final "t" was crossed with the same impatient slash I always used.
But the ink…
Blue.
And I've only ever owned black.
—
I tried, at first, to reason with myself. I paced the apartment barefoot, whispering possibilities into the stillness like they might save me.
Sleepwalking? Dissociative episode? Maybe I'd scrawled the message in some half-dreaming state, a desperate subconscious flare fired into the night. I'd had those episodes before—the blank spaces in memory, the sudden time-skips where I'd come to in a place I didn't remember entering. Moments when I stared at myself in the mirror and saw someone else blinking back.
But this felt different.
Sharper. Quieter. Older.
Like a story that had already happened.
I stood by the window and looked out over the street, watching the way morning light spilled between buildings like a secret. The city was already awake—traffic murmuring, pigeons flapping clumsily from ledge to ledge. It looked normal. Ordinary. But I'd stopped trusting appearances long ago.
Not when I could still see her in my mind every time I closed my eyes.
Elara.
Not a dream. Not a figment.
Something else.
—
I tore the apartment apart.
Desperation didn't come all at once. It rose like heat—slow, suffocating, inevitable. First, I emptied the drawers. Then the closet. Pulled clothes from hangers like they might be hiding answers. I sliced open the cushions on the couch, flipped through every journal I had ever half-finished—pages of abandoned poems, grocery lists, quotes from books I didn't remember reading.
But there was nothing.
Nothing that proved she'd ever existed.
Except one thing.
A photo album.
It was buried on the top shelf of my closet, hidden beneath a pile of old sweaters and dust-covered gift bags. I hadn't touched it in years. Not because I didn't care—but because I didn't know what I'd see.
My family always looked better in pictures.
Smiling when they weren't speaking. Laughing when I remembered crying. They were professionals at performance, even before I knew what pretending looked like. In photos, we looked normal. Happy. Like something out of a commercial for the kind of life I never really lived.
Still, my hands moved on their own.
I pulled it down, blew the dust away, and opened to the first page.
—
My seventh birthday.
I was missing two teeth and grinning like I had no idea the world would one day fall apart. My fingers clutched a cake I didn't bake. The name on it was wrong—Aidon. Not Aiden. But no one had noticed, or cared enough to fix it. Least of all me.
My mother stood stiffly beside me, her smile more like a mask stretched too tight across her face. My father had one hand on my shoulder, his expression frozen in the limbo between blink and boredom.
And there—behind the curtains, nearly swallowed by shadow—was a figure.
Thin. Small. Wearing a hoodie too big for her frame. Head tilted slightly. Eyes not looking at the camera… but looking at me.
Or maybe not at me.
Maybe through me.
I felt my stomach twist.
I grabbed my phone, snapped a picture of the photo, and zoomed in.
The image broke into pixels, but the shape didn't vanish. Her face distorted—but the eyes… the eyes didn't change.
Wide. Watchful. Familiar in the way things are only familiar when they come from dreams.
It was her.
Elara.
—
I flipped through the album faster now, hands shaking.
School plays. Beach trips. Graduation. Christmas. The edges of my childhood flickered past in glossy color, each photo a frozen moment I could almost remember.
And again, again, again—she was there.
Not in every image. But enough to matter.
A shape reflected in glass. A figure on the fringe. A whisper of yellow. Her face always half-turned, never posing, never acknowledged.
She was missing from the center. But always in the margins.
A girl hidden just outside memory's reach.
A question I hadn't known to ask.
—
I brought the album to therapy.
Dr. Felton turned the pages slowly, delicately, like each photo might break under the weight of his analysis. His office smelled faintly of eucalyptus and paper. He wore the same wire-frame glasses he always did, the same sweater vest with a tiny unraveling thread at the collar.
"So," he said, "you think she's in these?"
I nodded. "I know she is."
He pointed to a Halloween picture. I was nine, dressed as a pirate. There was a blur near the edge of the frame—barely visible behind the chain-link fence.
"That?" he asked gently. "That could be anyone. A neighbor. A trick of the light."
"It's her."
"Aiden," he said, lowering the book, "what you're experiencing has a name. Pareidolia. It's a very common phenomenon. The brain searches for patterns, for familiarity. It fills in blanks. Especially when we're lonely. Especially when we're hurting."
"I'm not seeing faces in clouds," I snapped, then immediately regretted my tone. "This isn't just wishful thinking."
He didn't argue. He never did.
"What do you want from this?" he asked instead.
I swallowed. "I want to know if she was real."
"And what would that change?"
Everything, I wanted to say.
But the words didn't come.
—
That night, I couldn't sleep.
I turned the lamp on and sat cross-legged on the floor with the photo album in my lap. I flipped back to the birthday picture.
Stared.
And stared.
And somewhere, in the spaces between seconds, something shifted.
The blur sharpened—not on the page, but in me. Like the static had cleared, like my mind had stopped resisting.
And I saw her.
Smiling.
But not at me.
She was looking past me. Over my shoulder. Toward something—someone—I couldn't yet remember.
—
In the morning, the photo was gone.
The page was still labeled "7th Birthday." But the photograph had been carefully removed. The plastic sleeve was intact. No glue residue. No damage.
In its place was a folded note.
Same familiar handwriting.
Same foreign blue ink.
You can't find me in the past.
Try listening to the books.
—
I sat in stunned silence.
The phrase echoed in my skull like a melody I'd heard long ago.
And then, slowly, it returned.
A library.
Tucked behind the post office. Small. Dusty. Forgotten by time.
I'd been there once, long ago—before the day the sky broke in half. I'd wandered between the shelves, half-lost in thought, and pulled a book from the wrong section. No title. No cover. Blank pages that bled ink the more you touched them.
And on one of those pages…
A sentence had appeared.
I hadn't known what it meant then.
But I think I do now.
That was the first time she reached out to me.
And I hadn't listened.
Not yet.
—
To be continued…