Some people write diaries.
I write instructions for the future I'm afraid I'll forget.
—
There's a kind of silence only libraries understand.
Not the polite hush of turned pages or soft footsteps on carpeted floors, nor the abandoned stillness of unused buildings—
But a silence that lives. That waits. That listens back.
It's the quiet of memory with teeth.
The kind of quiet that wraps itself around your ankles when you're not looking and whispers:
I remember what you forgot.
The library on 3rd and Waverly was still there. Somehow.
A brick skeleton with soot-smudged windows, pressed between a shuttered tailor's shop and a parking lot that had forgotten what cars were. Ivy crawled up one side like it was trying to reclaim the building molecule by molecule. The door still creaked in the exact same way I remembered—as if the building itself were surprised I'd come back.
The moment I stepped inside, time peeled away.
The air was warm with radiator dust and the perfume of disintegrating pages. Somewhere, a fluorescent light buzzed like it was trying to remember how to die. I stood there in the entryway, dizzy with déjà vu, with something close to dread.
She'd been here. I knew it.
Not recently. Not visibly. But the way a name clings to a place.
Elara Morrin.
I whispered it like a charm. Like a key.
Elara Morrin.
Elara Morrin.
Elara—
If I said it enough, maybe the syllables would stitch her back into the fabric of the world. Maybe the vowels could find her outline in the dust and unblur her from the edges of time.
Maybe I could earn her.
—
The shelves loomed ahead like ribs inside a fossilized beast—narrow, ancient, crooked. They whispered in wood grain and paper, bending slightly under the weight of books that hadn't been touched in decades.
I walked slowly.
Each step felt like a footfall in a dream you're not sure is yours. The floorboards creaked like something was waking up under them. I paused near the corner where fiction blurred into folklore, half-hoping she'd step out from between the stacks with that upside-down book in her hands, that half-smile curling at the edges.
Maybe she'd say something impossible.
Maybe she'd say:
Took you long enough.
But she didn't.
So I sat.
Same back table.
Same flickering lamp overhead, buzzing like it had a secret it was dying to tell but couldn't quite translate into light.
I opened my journal.
The one with the cracked spine and the smeared cover that read, in fading ink:
The Archive of Almost.
Inside were pages like haunted rooms.
Letters I had written to no one. To everyone.
To her.
Some I remembered writing—grief-drunk, insomnia-bitten, hands trembling at 2:47 AM.
Others…
Others felt like they had written themselves.
The same letters. The same voice.
But different.
Like a version of me who had lived longer. Felt deeper. Forgotten more.
One page stopped me cold.
—
March 12th
Dear Aiden,
If you're reading this, you've forgotten again.
That's okay. You always forget around this time.
I don't blame you.
Memory is a hallway with too many locked doors.
Just promise me this time,
when the rain starts falling upward,
you'll listen instead of looking.
She hides in the margins.
She always has.
Her name was Yesterday.
And so was yours.
—
I didn't realize I was crying until the ink blurred beneath my thumb.
The handwriting wasn't quite mine, but it wasn't foreign either. It lived in the uncanny space between recognition and denial—like a voice you hear in a dream and only realize after waking that it was your own.
The edges of the page were worn. Creased from being folded, unfolded, refolded. Over and over. Like something I'd carried with me across different lives. Like a relic passed from one version of me to the next, hoping one of us would finally understand.
And maybe—just maybe—I was the one who could.
—
The library's computer system was as ancient as the building itself. A dull-gray terminal with a yellowed keyboard that wheezed into life when I touched it.
I didn't search her name.
Instead, I typed:
Her Name Was Yesterday
The screen blinked. Glitched. Froze for a breath too long.
Then:
Author: E. Morrin
Title: Her Name Was Yesterday
Published: Unknown
Location: Sub-Level B – Archive Access Only
Sub-Level B?
I'd lived in this city nearly my whole life. I'd been to this library more times than I could count. But I had never heard of a Sub-Level B.
And yet—
The name felt right.
Like a password I didn't know I remembered.
—
No signs. No maps.
Just a whisper behind the ribs of the building that led me past the usual stacks, past the genealogy section roped off with caution tape, past rows of microfilm no one had touched in twenty years.
At the very back: a steel door marked Staff Only, painted the color of dried blood.
It wasn't locked.
The hinges groaned as I pushed it open, revealing a concrete stairwell spiraling downward into silence. No sound but my breath and the creak of old bones under my skin.
The air changed. Grew denser. Older.
Every step I took felt heavier, like memory had mass.
Why are you doing this? something whispered in me.
And I whispered back:
Because if she exists on paper… maybe I'm not the only one who remembers.
—
The room at the bottom looked like something out of a forgotten Cold War bunker.
Filing cabinets wrapped in rusted chains. Dust thick enough to write secrets in. A flickering overhead bulb casting long shadows like blades across the floor.
And there—beneath a cone of dying yellow light on a single table—was a book.
Small. Worn.
The cover read:
Her Name Was Yesterday
by Elara Morrin
My hands shook.
I reached for it slowly, reverently. Like it might vanish if I moved too fast.
I opened the cover—
And forgot how to breathe.
—
The first page read:
He loved me before he was born.
I waited for him to remember.
He always does.
Just not in time.
I read it again.
Then again.
Each word a pinprick in my chest. A recognition not of language, but of self. The kind of knowing that comes not from reading, but from remembering something you didn't know you'd lost.
The book wasn't a novel.
It wasn't fiction.
It was… her voice.
Elara's voice.
And every page—every shattered fragment, every image scrawled in delicate, looping prose—was a moment from my life.
But not from my perspective.
From hers.
—
A page describing me at six years old, curled in a bathtub, trying not to cry loud enough for my parents to hear.
A line I had whispered at seventeen, half-drunk and half-dreaming, to no one but the night sky.
A dream I'd had once—of a hallway full of doors, all of them locked, all of them labeled with dates I didn't recognize.
She had seen them all.
Watched them.
Kept them.
Loved them.
Not from the outside.
But from just outside reach.
Like a ghost.
Like a memory with a heartbeat.
—
At the very back of the book, I found a return slip.
Stamped in red ink, slightly smudged:
Due: Yesterday
I looked up.
And for a single moment—one impossible breath—
I saw her.
In the reflection of the blackened window.
She stood just behind me.
Yellow raincoat.
Wet hair curling at the ends.
One red boot. One black.
Her eyes met mine in the glass.
And she smiled.
Not with her lips.
With her knowing.
A sadness wrapped in hope.
A look that said:
I'm still here. You're almost there.
I turned around.
The room was empty.
—
Only a note remained.
Folded in half. Placed where the book had been.
Written in ink I didn't recognize, in handwriting I almost did:
I exist more when you miss me.
—
And I did.
God, I did.
More than anything.
—
To be continued…