"You don't lose people like Elara. You just wake up one day and realize they were never really there."
⸻
I woke with the note still folded beneath my pillow, though I had no memory of putting it there.
Don't forget me again.
My own handwriting. But the ink… not mine. And the word again—that was what haunted me most.
Again meant history.
Again meant recurrence.
Again meant that somehow, once already, I had let her go.
Had it happened before?
Was it happening still?
I spent the morning trying to rationalize. To convince myself it had been a sleepwalking accident. That maybe, in the middle of a dissociative haze, I had scribbled that message to myself. A cry from some fractured corner of my mind. A poetic hallucination. A lapse of reason masquerading as mystery.
I'd had black-out nights before. The kind where hours slipped through my hands like water and left me waking up hollow and unfamiliar, like I was wearing my own body wrong. It was easier to believe this was one of those.
But I didn't believe it. Not really.
Not when the word again tasted like déjà vu.
Not when I could still see her face every time I blinked.
⸻
I tore the apartment apart.
Closets. Drawers. Old boxes sealed with duct tape. I sliced open cushions and flipped through every notebook I could find—scribbled-through journals, half-finished stories, fragments of poems I wrote in college when I still believed in futures.
I was looking for proof. A receipt. A torn corner of something shared. A memory etched in ink. Anything.
But there was nothing.
Except one thing I hadn't touched in years:
My family photo album.
It lived on the highest shelf in my bedroom closet. Buried under a stack of old clothes that didn't fit anymore and birthday cards I never opened. It wasn't that I didn't care about the past—I just never felt like I had one that belonged to me.
My family always looked better in photographs. Frozen smiles. Symmetrical hugs. A perfectly normal life if you didn't listen too long.
I pulled the album down and opened it slowly, like it might bite.
⸻
The first photo was from my seventh birthday.
I was smiling. Wide-eyed. A crooked grin full of cake and missing teeth. I held a cake in my hands, the kind that came pre-frosted from a supermarket. My name was spelled wrong: Aidon. No one had ever corrected it. Not even me.
My mother stood to my left, her smile tight, as though it had been negotiated. My father was on the right, caught mid-blink, his hand on my shoulder like he wasn't sure where to place it.
And just behind me—partially obscured by the curtains—stood a girl.
She was nearly hidden. You wouldn't see her unless you were looking. A dark hoodie. Thin frame. Pale hands. Her eyes were wide, watchful. Not looking at the camera. Not looking at the cake.
Looking at me.
Or something behind me.
I pulled out my phone, zoomed in. The image pixelated, distorting into blocks and ghosts of color. Her face blurred, warped—but the eyes. The eyes didn't change.
I knew those eyes. I had dreamed them.
Elara.
⸻
I flipped faster now. Through beach trips and snow days. School plays. Graduation. Always the same: I was centered, smiling, lifeless. My parents framed the edges like statues. Friends with names I barely remembered drifted in and out of focus.
And somewhere, in the background—half-reflected in mirrors, barely visible in the blur of motion—was her.
Not every photo. But enough.
A shape. A shadow. A whisper in the margins.
She was never posing. Never acknowledged. But always there.
Like a ghost hiding just outside memory.
A glitch. A seam in the illusion. A truth I'd been trained not to see.
⸻
I brought the album with me to therapy.
Dr. Felton looked at it as though it were a relic from another world. He always took care when handling my evidence, like he was afraid he might break something sacred. He opened the album slowly, page by page, flipping through with his usual unreadable calm.
"So you think she was in these pictures all along?" he asked.
"I don't think," I said. "I know."
He tapped one of the pages. A Halloween photo. I was dressed as a pirate, age nine. Behind me, a blur near the edge of the fence.
"That?" he said gently. "That could be anyone."
"It's not anyone. It's her."
"Aiden…" he sighed, lowering his eyes. "What you're experiencing has a name. Pareidolia. It's when the brain recognizes familiar patterns where none exist. We see faces in clouds. Shapes in trees. Sometimes, when we want something badly enough, the mind gives it to us."
"But what if that's not what this is?" I leaned forward. "What if the blank spaces were put there? What if someone erased her and left me behind by accident?"
He gave me a long look. Closed the album softly.
"What do you want from this, Aiden?"
I answered without thinking. "To know if she was real."
"And what would that change?"
I hesitated. "…Everything."
⸻
That night, I couldn't sleep.
I stared at the ceiling until it became sky. The silence was louder than usual. I got up, turned on the lamp, and pulled the album back into my lap.
I opened to the birthday photo. Let my eyes drink in every detail. The curtains. The cake. The hands on my shoulder. And the girl in the corner, half in shadow, barely visible.
I stared for what felt like hours.
And then something happened.
I don't know how to explain it. But the blur… shifted. The way fog lifts when the sun hits it just right. Her face became clearer—not on the page, not in pixels, but in my mind.
Like the memory had always been there, waiting behind a door I had finally dared to open.
She was smiling.
But not at me.
At something behind me.
Something I wasn't ready to remember.
⸻
In the morning, the photo was gone.
The page was still there—still labeled "7th Birthday." But the photo itself had been removed. Torn out cleanly, without damage to the page. As if it had never been glued in at all.
In its place, tucked neatly inside the plastic sleeve, was another note.
Same handwriting. Same off-colored ink.
You can't find me in the past. Try listening to the books.
⸻
I stared at the note for a long time.
Try listening to the books.
It wasn't just strange. It was familiar.
And then it hit me.
There was a library.
A small one, tucked behind the old post office.
A place I hadn't been since before my mind had started to slip. Before Elara. Before the day the sky split in two.
And in that library—on a rainy afternoon I barely remembered—I had once pulled a book from the wrong shelf. A book without a title. A book with a missing cover and blank pages that bled ink as you turned them.
The first page she ever touched had fallen into my hands there.
And I hadn't known what to do with it.
Until now.
⸻
To be continued…