"There is a place where everything you've ever lost goes. Not to be taken. But to be remembered."
I don't remember falling asleep.
Nor do I remember waking up.
One moment I was pacing the apartment floor, silent, unthinking, and the next, I was somewhere else entirely. Walking.
No direction. No aim. Only the dull ache of motion, as if each step was an attempt to outrun a memory I hadn't yet remembered.
Street after street slipped past me like breath, quiet, unnoticed, automatic, until I arrived at one I had never seen before.
It had no name.
Only a rusted iron gate stood before me, twisted out of shape as if once forced open and never forgiven for it. The hinges creaked as the wind passed through, more warning than welcome. Hanging above it, the words:
"To Remember, Enter Alone."
I stepped through.
Not out of courage.
But because, somehow, I already knew I had.
Behind the gate, the world changed.
It was not day.
Not night.
The sky was the color of forgetting, a washed-out hush, like time itself had paused to see if I'd really follow through. Nothing moved. Not the air. Not the light. The entire city seemed to hold its breath.
They call it the City of Forgotten Things.
But it is not empty.
No, it is crowded, densely, painfully, though not with people.
With remains.
Memories shed like skin, lost objects abandoned by the hands that once held them. I walked past clocks still ticking but stripped of their hands. Telephones rang in soft bursts. No one answered. No one remembered why. Along the curb sat rows of tiny shoes, faded and weathered, lined as though waiting for children who would never return.
A violin played itself from a cracked windowsill. The melody was slow, hollow, honest. The kind of music only grief composes. No beginning. No end. Only ache.
I found a wall etched in chalk.
Thousands of names. Overlapping. Layered like dust on dust.
Mine was there.
Twice.
Once written clearly.
The other reversed. Nedia. As if mirrored by a self I had long since turned away from. That version was darker, etched deeper into the stone, as though time had tried to erase it but failed.
I kept walking.
Searching.
For her.
For the version of myself I had left behind in this place.
I found a bookstore cradled between two weeping trees.
Its windows were fogged, shelves tilted. No covers on the books. No titles. Only single words carved onto their spines.
Regret.
Almost.
That Night in November.
The Lie You Still Tell.
Elara.
I reached for the last one.
Its pages were blank.
But when I touched them, ink bled up from beneath the paper, slow, like tears rising through skin. Not words, but moments.
Her laughter.
The tune she hummed while braiding her hair.
The warmth of her hand in mine at a train station I couldn't recall ever visiting.
And worse
My voice.
Telling her goodbye.
As if I meant it.
I wandered like a fevered ghost through the city's dreamlike corridors until I arrived at what looked like a museum.
Inside, rows of glass cases stretched endlessly, each one containing a letter, sealed but unsent. No stamps. No addresses. Just heartbreak folded carefully inside aged paper.
I scanned until I saw my own handwriting.
My hand trembled as I lifted it.
The ink had bled. Smudged, as if written through tears.
If I had stayed, would you have lived?
If I had loved you louder, would you have stayed?
I can't remember if you died, or if I just let you disappear.
I don't know which one hurts more.
I couldn't fold the letter again.
Because I knew the answer.
And I hated it.
I kept walking.
The streets narrowed. Grew dim. Older somehow.
Then I saw him.
A boy made of smoke. Barely there.
He clutched a single paper rose in both hands, its edges charred.
His eyes were coal-black, ancient. He looked straight through me and whispered.
"She waits by the train."
And vanished.
I followed the tracks.
They sliced through the city like veins, carrying silence from one wound to another. Eventually, they led me to a station.
Familiar.
Uncomfortably so.
I'd seen it before. In dreams. In sketches. In a photograph I could never explain.
She was there.
Not Elara exactly. But a version of her.
She looked faded at the edges, flickering like candlelight in a windless room. Her body shimmered, translucent, tired in the way only dreams can be. But her eyes were still whole. Still hers.
She sat on a bench, unmoving. As if she'd never left.
She didn't look at me. She didn't have to.
In a voice so soft it might've been memory itself, she said:
"You buried me in a place that doesn't forget."
I sat beside her.
For a while, I said nothing. I didn't trust my voice to hold.
When I finally spoke, it came out smaller than I meant.
"I didn't know I left you here."
"You didn't," she said, still staring forward. "You just stopped coming back."
Then she turned.
Her face had aged. Not by time, but by sorrow.
Beautiful, the way grief can be beautiful. Shaped by the weight of all that was never said.
"You can't carry me anymore, Aiden."
"I don't want to let go."
She reached for my hand, gently, as if it might break.
"If you don't," she said, "you'll never find yourself."
Something shifted inside me then.
Not shattered.
Unlocked.
Like a door I hadn't known existed suddenly opened, and the air changed.
The train arrived.
Old. Empty. Breathing quiet steam.
She rose to her feet.
Before boarding, she reached into her coat and placed something in my palm.
It was the paper heart.
The same one from the coffin sketch.
But now, it bore writing. Her handwriting.
"This is your last memory of me.
Let it be the first of you."
She leaned in.
Kissed my forehead. Not as a farewell, but as a benediction.
Then she stepped aboard.
As the train pulled away, she looked back once.
Just long enough to smile.
And then the fog took her.
And she was gone.
I woke on a bench at the edge of the city.
Dawn spilled through thinning clouds.
No sound.
No train.
Only the quiet that comes after something sacred has passed.
My hand was still clenched.
Inside it, crumpled, fragile, torn.
A single page from a book I never wrote.
It held only three words:
Her name was Yesterday.