Chapter 2 – Echoes in the Rain

Days passed, or maybe weeks—I couldn’t tell anymore. Time had lost its shape. It melted into the same dull rhythm of rain against my window, the same half-drunk cups of coffee, the same silence that seemed to breathe beside me.

Her absence wasn’t loud; it was quiet, patient. It didn’t scream—it lingered, like the faint scent of her perfume that refused to fade from my clothes.

I tried to live as if she were just another chapter closed, but the truth was, I was still trapped inside it. Every place I went whispered her name. The old library still smelled of wet paper and ink, but now the chair across from me stayed empty. I found myself reaching for poetry books she used to read, tracing my fingers over lines she once loved.

Each verse cut deeper than the last.

“Love is sweet when it begins…”

Her voice echoed in my mind. I closed the book before it reached the end of that line. I didn’t need to read it—I was already living the ashes part.

Sometimes, I would walk to the graveyard where she loved to wander. The night air there was colder now, less forgiving. The moon hung low, pale and distant, like an eye watching over forgotten souls. I used to think she found peace among the graves, but now I wondered if she had been practicing her goodbye all along.

I walked among the stones, reading names that meant nothing to me, until one night I found a fresh grave. No name, no flowers, just a slab of stone and wet soil. I don’t know why, but I sat there for hours. Maybe I hoped that if I listened closely enough, I’d hear her voice again, whispering from somewhere beyond the earth.

Grief is strange. It makes you see ghosts—not the kind that frighten, but the kind that comfort.

I began to see her in reflections: in puddles after the rain, in the fogged glass of coffee shops, in the dim light of the streetlamps when the world was asleep.

Sometimes she smiled. Sometimes she looked sad. Sometimes she turned away.

And every time, my heart broke anew.

I stopped going to work for a while. My friends called, but I couldn’t answer. What could I say? That I was haunted by someone who might still be alive—or might not? That her memory had built a home inside my mind and refused to leave?

People don’t understand that kind of love. They call it madness. Maybe they’re right.

But madness is just another name for devotion that has nowhere left to go.

One morning, after another sleepless night, I found an envelope slipped under my door. There was no address, no name. Just my initials written in the handwriting I knew too well—thin, slanted, fragile like her.

Inside was a single piece of paper. A poem.

> “Don’t look for me in the dawn,

for I was never meant for daylight.

I belong to the rain, the whisper, the silence between heartbeats.

When you write of me,

write not of endings,

but of moments that refused to die.”

My hands trembled. The paper smelled faintly of lavender and ink.

Was it her? Was she alive?

I wanted to believe it. I needed to believe it.

That night, I went back to the library. It was closed, but I found my way in through the side door the way we used to. The air was thick with dust, the bookshelves standing like silent witnesses.

I sat at our old table, the same one where she had whispered her first verse to me.

And for a moment—just a heartbeat—I thought I saw her sitting across from me again, head bent over a book, hair falling in soft waves across her face.

I blinked, and she was gone. Only the echo of her perfume remained.

I began to write then.

Not to remember her—but to keep her alive.

Each word felt like a thread tying her to the world again. I wrote about the rain, the graveyard, her laughter in the thunder, the way her fingers trembled when she painted my name. I wrote until dawn, until my eyes burned and my heart felt hollow.

When I finished, I realized something: she had never really asked me to move on. She had asked me to keep her alive in words. And that, somehow, made it easier to breathe.

The days that followed became a blur of ink and paper. I filled notebook after notebook, building her a world out of sentences. In my words, she was still alive—laughing, walking, loving, disappearing and returning.

The more I wrote, the more I felt her beside me. Sometimes I even spoke aloud, reading to her like she was listening somewhere beyond the veil of reality.

And maybe she was.

Because one night, when I finished a chapter, I heard it—the faintest knock at the window.

The rain was falling again, soft and steady. I turned, and for a fleeting second, I saw her reflection. Not solid, not real—just light and water and memory. But her eyes met mine, and I swear, she smiled.

Then the thunder rolled, and she was gone again.

But this time, it didn’t hurt as much.

Because I understood.

She wasn’t coming back—not in body, at least.

She had become what she always wanted to be—a story worth remembering, a ghost that lived between words.

Now, every time it rains, I sit by the window with my notebook open.

I write, and I wait.

Not for her return, but for her memory to breathe again through the ink.

And when I finish each page, I whisper her name into the storm, letting it carry her wherever forgotten souls go.

Because she once said, “Let’s live enough to be worth forgetting.”

But I think she was wrong.

Some loves aren’t meant to be forgotten.