"Some people you remember like a wound. Some like a ghost. Elara was both."
⸻
They say memory is a lie we tell ourselves to survive.
I used to believe I was immune to that. That what I remembered was real, honest, untouched. But now I'm not so sure.
Because the first time I saw her—the first time I think I saw her—was on a day that shouldn't have existed.
It rained backward.
I know how that sounds.
But I remember it clearly.
The sky had been split in two—one half swollen and dark, full of clouds like smoke coiled tight around thunder, the other painted in burnt sunlight that dripped slowly down the edges of buildings like blood from a nosebleed. People around me had vanished into cafés or beneath awnings, shielding themselves from a storm that wasn't really falling. The streets were wet, but the air was dry. The wind moved upward instead of sideways. A child's umbrella spun midair like it had forgotten gravity. And in that impossible stillness, where the world felt paused between two realities, I saw her.
She was standing alone at the bus stop.
A girl in a yellow raincoat.
It looked too big for her—something borrowed or left behind by someone else. The sleeves hung low, and the hood was bunched at her back like a cape. She held a book upside down and read it with complete focus, as if nothing was unusual, as if she'd read that way her whole life.
I remember stopping in my tracks. I wasn't in a rush, not really. My job didn't care if I showed up late, and I had nothing waiting for me at home except an overflowing sink and a dead houseplant. Still, something about her—her stillness in the chaos—made my breath catch.
She didn't look at me right away. Her dark hair was wet at the ends, curling like it had been dipped in a lake. One of her boots was red. The other was black. It should've looked ridiculous, but it didn't. It looked like something that made perfect sense in a dream you could only half-remember.
When she finally glanced up, our eyes met—and something inside me flinched. Like a door swinging open in a house I didn't know I lived in.
And then she said it:
"You're late."
I froze. "…Do I know you?"
"Not yet," she said, turning her book right-side up without looking.
I should've walked away.
Should've laughed or mumbled an excuse and crossed the street.
But I didn't.
There was something strange in the way she said it. Not flirtatious, not mocking—just sure. Like time had passed differently for her. Like we were already halfway through a conversation I hadn't started.
I sat on the bench beside her. I remember my heart beating too fast for no reason I could understand. It was the first time in years that I'd felt anything close to curiosity. To danger. To meaning.
"What are you reading?" I asked.
She looked at the book again. "It's about forgetting," she said. "Every time you turn a page, the one before it disappears. By the end, you don't remember what the story was about. Or even if it was a story at all."
"That sounds exhausting."
She smiled softly. "It's the only honest kind of story."
There was something about her voice that made everything else fall away. The cars. The backwards rain. Even my own name felt faint, like a sound underwater. I didn't ask for hers. I didn't need to. Somehow, I already knew it.
Elara.
Elara Morrin.
The name settled in my chest like a weight I'd been carrying for years without realizing it.
We sat in silence after that. For how long, I'm not sure. The bus never came. Neither of us checked the time. And then, without a word, she stood up and walked down the street, turning a corner I didn't recognize. I didn't follow her.
⸻
That night, I tried to write about her.
I sat at my desk with a pen I hadn't used in months and stared at a blank page for what felt like hours. I wanted to write what I'd seen. What I'd felt. But the words got stuck somewhere between thought and paper. Everything came out flat, unworthy. Like trying to paint a ghost.
The only thing I managed to write—scrawled in shaky handwriting, center of the page—was one word:
YESTERDAY.
⸻
The next morning, I woke up with the kind of nervous hope I hadn't felt since I was a teenager.
I dressed with unusual care. Pressed shirt. Clean pants. Even cologne, which I hadn't worn in months. I made sure I left my apartment at the exact same time. Walked the exact same route. Stood at the exact same bus stop.
She wasn't there.
I went back the next day.
And the next.
And the next.
I even brought a yellow raincoat in my bag, just in case she might appear and I could return it, though I had no proof it was hers.
I asked around. Described her to a man running a flower stall. To the old woman who fed pigeons near the bench. To a student sketching in a notebook. No one remembered her. No one had seen a girl in a yellow coat.
I walked into every bookstore I passed and asked if they sold a book like the one she'd described.
A story about forgetting.
One clerk laughed and said that sounded like half their fiction section.
After a week, I stopped looking.
But I didn't forget.
Couldn't.
Because some people don't fade.
Some people embed themselves in your silence.
⸻
Years passed.
I moved apartments. Switched jobs. I dated, briefly. One girl liked to sing old jazz standards in the kitchen. Another collected postcards from cities she'd never visited. None of them stayed long. I smiled, but I was never really there.
I started taking pills. The kind they give you when the world feels too sharp. When sleep doesn't come and the past doesn't stay put. The pills helped, I think. But they didn't erase her.
Every yellow coat on the street made me look twice.
Every upside-down book made my chest tighten.
Every girl with eyes like a storm—that quiet, knowing kind of chaos—I couldn't help but wonder.
Was it her?
Or just my mind dressing up strangers in the clothes of memory?
⸻
The first time I said her name out loud was in therapy.
My fourth session with Dr. Felton. A quiet man with wire-frame glasses and the kind of voice that never pushed too hard.
"And who is Elara?" he asked, pen already poised.
I hesitated. My mouth felt dry. "I don't know," I said, suddenly ashamed of how much it still hurt. "Maybe nobody. Maybe someone I dreamed once and forgot to stop loving."
He tilted his head, thoughtful. "Or maybe someone real that you chose to forget."
I shook my head. "If she were real… someone else would remember her."
⸻
That night, after therapy, I returned to my apartment. Everything felt dim. I opened the fridge and stared inside without hunger. Walked into the kitchen and opened the cupboard above the sink, looking for a glass.
That's when I saw it.
A folded piece of paper.
I hadn't put it there. I would've noticed.
It was creased sharply in half. No markings on the outside. My heart stuttered.
Hands shaking, I opened it.
In the center of the page was a single sentence, written in handwriting I recognized as my own:
"Don't forget me again."
But the ink… the ink was blue.
I only owned black pens.
⸻
To be continued…