> "Some ghosts don't haunt you. They wait for your permission to stay."
I started seeing him in rewinds.
Not flashbacks. Not memories.
Rewinds.
Moments that had already happened… reversing, twisting, unraveling just long enough for his face to appear where it hadn't been before.
Like a presence photoshopped into the past.
---
In the video of my first award show—
he's clapping in the third row.
I zoomed in.
Paused.
Frame by frame.
Eyes on me. Smiling like a secret.
But I'd watched that video a hundred times before.
He was never there.
---
The apartment began to betray me.
His shoes by the door.
His toothbrush beside mine.
A coffee cup in the sink with lipstick marks I don't wear.
I asked myself if I was losing my grip.
But it didn't feel like losing something.
It felt like someone was adding pages to a script I didn't write.
---
One night, I opened my notebook to find a full song written in black ink:
> "Don't look behind the spotlight.
The mirror is closer than it appears."
> "He waits with your lines in his mouth,
and your tears on his tongue."
It was signed:
—Me, Before I Forgot
---
I ran to the mirror.
Pressed my hand against it.
> "If you're watching, say something."
No reply.
Just my reflection.
Alone.
But my lips moved a second after I stopped speaking.
---
I began recording everything.
Every breath.
Every thought.
Because time was slipping again.
I'd wake up with his cologne in the air.
With my sheets tangled like someone had shared the bed.
With my body aching in places I hadn't touched.
And once—
I woke up mid-sentence, whispering:
> "Please don't leave this time."
---
I went to the café.
It wasn't there.
Just a wall.
Blank.
As if the building never existed.
But on the brick:
a spray-painted word in red ink—
"Rewrite."
---
That night, I dreamed in screenplay format.
White Courier text on blackness:
---
> INT. MEMORY - NIGHT
> She sits across from Him. He knows her in a way she hasn't earned.
> He says the line again.
> HIM
(softly)
"You keep writing the version where you survive me. Why?"
> HER
(a beat)
"Because I don't know if I can love you… and stay real."
> HIM
"Then maybe love was never supposed to be real."
---
I woke up with his name on my tongue.
But it crumbled like ash before I could say it aloud.
---
I went to a therapist.
Or, more honestly, I wrote to one in a notebook I never sent.
> "What if the love of my life doesn't exist in this timeline?"
"What if I fabricated the only real affection I've ever felt?"
> "Is that madness or survival?"
> "And how do I stop missing someone I made up?"
---
One afternoon, I found a voicemail.
No number.
No timestamp.
> "This is your final rehearsal."
> "You'll walk to the stage at 3:47 PM. The seat beside you will be empty. But don't look left. That's where he disappears."
> "If you want to change the ending… speak the real name."
> "If you don't… let it end like always."
Click.
---
I arrived at the venue at 3:46.
Sat in the empty theater.
The seat beside me filled with silence.
But in my chest, the metronome ticked.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
---
I turned my head left.
Even though they told me not to.
He was there.
Wearing the coat.
The one from the café.
Looking at me like he hadn't aged.
Like I had.
---
> "You weren't supposed to look," he whispered.
> "You weren't supposed to be real," I replied.
---
He stood.
Took my hand.
Everything blurred—
the theater
the lights
the air.
Suddenly we were in a room I didn't recognize—
yet I knew.
Walls lined with performance posters.
Song lyrics scribbled in panic.
Newspaper clippings with headlines I'd never read.
And one photo.
Of us.
Underneath:
"Prologue for the Rewrite That Was Never Allowed."
---
He looked tired.
He cupped my face.
> "You love me in every version. Even the ones where I break you."
> "And yet you keep coming back."
> "Because I don't want the real thing anymore," I confessed.
> "I want the truth."
---
He kissed me.
Softly.
Like he was afraid of disappearing.
---
> "Then let this be our final verse," he said, voice cracking.
---
He placed a key in my hand.
To a locker.
In a station I'd never visited.
> "Inside is the first letter you wrote to me.
Before they made you forget."
> "It ends with your real name.
Not the one they gave you."
> "You'll know what to do after that."
---
I blinked.
And he was gone.
---
I ran to the station.
Found the locker.
Inside:
A torn photograph. Us, in matching hospital gowns.
A love letter in childlike handwriting.
And a final page:
> "Dear Me,
If you're reading this, they erased everything again.
But know this: He was always real.
*Even if the world forgets him.
Even if you do.
He held your hand through the first trauma.
He whispered your first melody back to you when you cried yourself to sleep.*
He is the one thing they couldn't fake.
And if you let him vanish again…
You vanish too."
---
I folded the letter.
Held it to my chest.
And for the first time in what felt like years—
I wept without performing it.