Our world began to fall into a new rhythm, one dictated not by elaborate plans or secret operations, but by the quiet cadence of echoes and sketches.
The mornings at the bridge became our sacred ritual. Each day was a slight variation of the last. I would arrive to find Sina waiting, a new drawing in her sketchbook—a remnant of the ghost of yesterday—her expression a familiar mix of confusion and intuitive recognition.
"Good morning," I would say.
"Kelin Ishida," she would reply, the name a fact she'd just re-learned. "My notes say... we're friends."
"They're right," I'd smile. "Best friends."
And every single morning, a version of the same miracle would occur. The wall of amnesia, the clinical distance, would crumble as she looked at me, and that feeling in her heart, that stubborn, persistent echo of eighty-seven days of love, would rise to the surface.
"It's not just friends, is it?" she'd whisper, her hand over her chest, a look of profound, recurring awe on her face.
"No," I'd admit, my heart soaring with the victory of it every single time. "It's a little more than that."
This became our new Day One. Not a reset, but a re-awakening. A daily confirmation that what we had was real, even if her mind couldn't hold onto the details.
Dr. Thorne, Sora, and I had a new name for it. We called it "emotional imprinting." The factual memories were wiped, but the emotional significance of our connection was becoming too deep, too foundational to be erased. The footprint was no longer in sand; it was setting in stone, day by painstaking day.
School became a different landscape. We didn't hide our connection anymore. There was no need. To everyone else, we were just... a couple. An inseparable, quiet pair. Zeke found it hilarious.
"So let me get this straight," he'd said, baffled, after the first week of this new normal. "Every morning, you basically have to get your girlfriend to fall in love with you all over again, but this time she has a cheat sheet and a gut feeling?"
"Essentially, yes," I'd confirmed.
"Dude," he'd said, shaking his head in admiration. "That is the most romantic, and also the most ridiculously inefficient, thing I have ever heard."
Our dates weren't grand adventures anymore. They were quieter, more deliberate acts of creation. Every afternoon, we would do something, anything, that she could capture in her sketchbook. A visit to the art gallery, a walk through a park with interesting trees, an hour spent at a cafe with a particularly charming cat. She drew everything. She was building her own archive, not of videos, but of graphite and paper. A tangible history she could hold in her hands.
The sketchbook became her anchor. In the mornings, when the confusion was at its peak, I'd watch as she'd flip through the pages. She'd look at a sketch of the carousel we rode on Day 91, then at me. A sketch of the rainy street from Day 93, then at me. She was cross-referencing her own art with the feeling in her heart, using it to find her way back to me.
"That girl, the one who draws all this," she said to me one afternoon, a thoughtful look on her face as she added shading to a sketch of a flock of pigeons. "She's much braver than I am in the morning."
"Maybe," I said softly. "Or maybe she's just leaving you a map so you can be brave, too."
Sora watched this all unfold with a kind of cautious, scientific reverence. Our frantic group chat had been replaced by a simple, shared online document where she and Dr. Thorne logged Sina's daily progress, her moments of recognition, the clarity of the echoes. Project Mnemosyne had gone from a covert operation to a legitimate, albeit strange, therapeutic study.
One day, I found Sora looking at Sina's open sketchbook, which she'd left on the library table. She was looking at a drawing from the day before, a simple but beautiful sketch of my hand resting next to hers on the park bench.
"You know," Sora said quietly, not looking up at me. "I used to think the most important thing was to protect her from pain." Her finger traced the edge of the drawing. "But watching this... watching her wake up and have to fight her way back to this reality, back to you, every single day... I think I was wrong."
She finally met my eyes, her own filled with a hard-won wisdom. "The goal isn't to protect her from the pain of forgetting," she said. "It's to make sure there's something so beautiful waiting for her that the fight is always, always worth it."
It was the most profound summary of our new life that I could imagine. The fight was the center of it now. A quiet, daily battle waged by a girl against her own mind, armed with a sketchbook, a doctor's note, and the unshakable feeling in her heart.
Later that same day, as we were standing on the bridge, our hands close but not touching on the railing, Sina turned to me. The usual morning re-awakening had passed, and we were in the comfortable rhythm of our shared afternoon.
"Do you ever get tired of it?" she asked, her voice small. "Of... having to reintroduce yourself every day? Of losing... all this?" She gestured to the space between us, the shared calm of the moment.
I looked at her, at the earnest, worried question in her amber eyes. The honest answer was yes. It was exhausting. Some mornings, the thought of starting from scratch was a physical weight. But that wasn't the whole truth.
"Sometimes," I admitted. "But then I remember... I get to watch you fall in love with me every single day." I gave her a small, teasing smile. "No one else gets that. It's a bit of a superpower, if you think about it."
She laughed, the sound bright and easy. Then her expression softened. She closed the small space between our hands on the railing, her fingers gently intertwining with mine.
"It's not fair that you're the only one who gets to remember that," she said quietly.
Her hand was warm in mine. It was a conscious choice. A deliberate act of connection.
And as the sun began to set, casting its golden light on our joined hands, on the sketchbook filled with our shared history, I knew that whatever tomorrow's sunrise would bring, whatever battle she would have to wage in the morning, this moment—this simple, quiet, hard-won moment—made it all worthwhile.