"I don't love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, / or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: / I love you as one loves certain obscure things, / secretly, between the shadow and the soul."
– Pablo Neruda
Time became a viscous, grey substance. Days bled into one another, marked only by the slow crawl of sunlight across the floor of Leo's apartment and the deepening chill in his bones. He moved through the world like a sleepwalker, navigating campus corridors, attending lectures with blank eyes that saw nothing, absorbing information like a sponge absorbing water that immediately leaked out. Food tasted like ash. Sleep was a fractured landscape of nightmares where Elara's face dissolved like smoke the moment he reached for her, leaving him gasping awake in the suffocating silence of the empty apartment.
He had stopped trying to convince anyone. The concerned looks from classmates, the gentle probing from his worried painting instructor, Professor Thorne ("Leo, your work... it's become so dark, so fragmented. Are you alright?"), the awkward silences when he momentarily forgot and mentioned her name – he met them all with a mute shake of his head or a mumbled "Fine." He *wasn't* fine. He was a ghost haunting his own life, tethered to a reality no one else perceived.
His sole anchor was his sketchbook. It became his bible, his tomb, his desperate battleground against oblivion. Pages filled not with assigned figure studies or landscapes, but with frantic, obsessive renderings of *her*. Her face, captured from every angle he could remember: laughing, pensive, sleepy, fierce. Close-ups of her eyes, trying to pin down the exact shade of warm brown, the specific pattern of gold flecks near the pupil. Studies of her hands – long fingers, the small scar on her knuckle from a childhood fall, the way she tucked her hair behind her ear.
But the sketches were changing. They grew messier, more desperate. Lines were heavier, smudged. Eraser marks scarred the paper where he'd tried and failed to capture the precise curve of her lower lip, the unique crinkle at the corner of her left eye when she smiled that particular, heartbreakingly tender smile. The harder he tried, the more the details seemed to slip away, like sand through clenched fists. The face on the paper was Elara, but it was also becoming an approximation, a fading photograph. The terror wasn't just her absence from the world; it was her fading presence in his *own* mind. The hollow Sylvia Plath described was being filled with the terrifying static of forgetting.
He sat now in "The Grind," the campus coffee shop they'd frequented. He hadn't chosen it consciously; his feet had carried him there, drawn by the ghost scent of her oat milk vanilla latte. He occupied the same small corner table, nursing a long-cold black coffee he hadn't touched. His sketchbook lay open, another attempt at her eyes staring sightlessly up at him, frustratingly *wrong*. The air buzzed with student chatter, the hiss of the espresso machine, the clatter of cups – a symphony of normalcy that grated against his raw nerves.
He wasn't listening. He was sunk deep inside the hollow, the noise a muffled roar against the deafening silence of her absence. He traced a smudged line on the page, trying to force the memory of her gaze, the way it could hold him utterly, making the rest of the world fall away. It wasn't working. The pencil felt clumsy, alien in his hand.
"...and then she just *smiled*," a voice cut through his fog, sharp and clear from the counter nearby. "Weirdest dream. Couldn't see her face, not really. Hazy, you know? But that *smile*..."
Leo's pencil stopped. He didn't look up. He held his breath.
The barista, a lanky guy with purple-tipped hair Leo vaguely recognized named Finn, was talking to his colleague, a girl named Chloe (not *that* Chloe, a different one). Finn wiped down the steam wand, frowning slightly. "It wasn't creepy or anything. Just... intense. Sad, but happy? Like she knew something incredibly beautiful was ending, but she was... okay with it? Accepting? Woke up feeling weirdly hollow. Like I'd lost something important I never even had."
*Sad, but happy. Knew something beautiful was ending. Hollow.*
The words slammed into Leo with the force of a physical blow. His head snapped up. He stared at Finn, his heart hammering against his ribs so violently he thought it might burst. Every nerve ending screamed. *That* smile. Elara's smile. The one she wore when they talked about the fleetingness of moments, the bittersweet beauty of autumn, the quiet sadness woven into profound joy. The smile that crinkled her eyes just so, holding the weight of the world's sorrow and love simultaneously. *Her* smile.
Finn continued, oblivious to the seismic shift happening a few feet away. "Yeah, totally hollow. Like someone carved out my chest and left an echo." He shrugged, forcing a grin. "Probably just stress. Midterms suck."
Hope, sharp and jagged and terrifying, pierced the thick numbness that had encased Leo. It wasn't just memory. It wasn't just his fading sketch. Someone *else* had seen it. Felt it. A fragment of her existed *outside* his crumbling mind.
He was on his feet before he realized it, the chair scraping loudly on the floor. He stumbled towards the counter, his sketchbook clutched like a shield. Finn and Chloe looked up, startled by his sudden approach, his wild eyes, his palpable intensity.
"That smile," Leo rasped, his voice raw, unused. "The one in your dream. Did... did her eyes crinkle? Like... like sunshine through cracked glass?" He held up his sketchbook, thrusting it towards Finn. On the page was a frantic, smudged attempt at her eyes, focused on that specific crinkle. "Like this?"
Finn recoiled slightly, his easygoing expression replaced by alarm and confusion. He glanced at the sketch, then back at Leo's desperate face. "Whoa, dude. Chill. It was just a dream." He took a step back. "A weird one, yeah, but... just a dream. I don't know about eyes. It was all fuzzy." He looked to Chloe for support, clearly unnerved.
Chloe eyed Leo warily. "You okay, man? You look like you've seen a ghost."
Leo ignored her. His focus was entirely on Finn. "The *feeling*. The hollow. You felt it. You described it. That wasn't just *any* smile. That was *her* smile." His voice rose, edged with a desperation that bordered on hysteria. "Elara! Her name is Elara! Did you see her name? Anything?"
Finn held up his hands, palms out. "Look, I don't know any Elara. And I don't remember any names from the dream. It was just a face... well, not even a face. Just... a feeling. A smile. That's it." He exchanged another worried look with Chloe. "Maybe you should sit down? Get some water?"
The fragile hope curdled into something sour and painful. Leo saw it in their eyes: not recognition, but concern laced with fear. They saw a stranger, unhinged, ranting about dreams and vanished girls. The shard of proof he'd grasped was slipping away, dissolving into the mundane reality of "just a dream."
He lowered the sketchbook, his arm heavy as lead. The frantic energy drained out of him, leaving him trembling and hollow again. But not *quite* the same hollow. This one held an ember. A single, desperate spark.
"Right," he mumbled, the word thick. "Just a dream. Sorry." He stumbled back to his table, ignoring their concerned whispers. He didn't sit. He gathered his things with clumsy hands, knocking over his cold coffee. The dark liquid spread across the table like a stain. He didn't stop to clean it.
He pushed out of the coffee shop into the crisp afternoon air. The world felt different. Not less empty, but... charged. Finn's words echoed in his mind: *Sad, but happy. Knew something beautiful was ending. Hollow.*
He pulled out his phone, fingers fumbling. He opened a new note. The blank screen glared at him. He typed, his thumbs clumsy:
*Dream Fragment #1: Barista (Finn, The Grind). Date: Oct 17.*
- Smile: "Sad, but happy."
- Feeling: "Like she knew something beautiful was ending."*
- Aftermath: "Hollow." "Like an echo."
- Physical: Face hazy. Eyes? Crinkle? (Unconfirmed).
- Connection: HER SMILE. Undeniably.
He stared at the words. Proof. Not proof for the world, but proof for *him*. A whisper in the dark. A fragment of Elara, surfacing in the subconscious of a stranger. Pablo Neruda's words echoed: "I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul." Her existence, her essence, wasn't entirely gone. It lingered in the shadowed spaces, in the soul of the dreaming world.
Leo Vale, the ghost, the sole rememberer, now had a mission. He tucked his phone away, clutching his sketchbook tighter. He wasn't just drowning anymore. He was hunting echoes. The world had erased Elara Everly, but it hadn't erased her smile. Not completely. And he would find it. Piece by fragmented piece, whisper by stolen whisper, he would gather the shards of the light Simone Weil had spoken of, the light the world had tried so meticulously to extinguish. He turned away from campus, his steps no longer aimless, but purposeful, heading deeper into the city, his ears straining for the next fragment of the smile she left behind.