At first, there was only the breath she couldn't steady.The hush of a room without corners.The weight of loneliness she couldn't name.
Raylene curled in on herself — not because she chose to, but because her body remembered how to break before her mind did.
She didn't sob.She didn't shake.She just folded, like a page someone forgot to read.
Her tears fell without sound, slow and stunned — grief without context, ache without a wound.
Then—
A touch.
Warm.Real.Impossible.
Fingers rested lightly on her shoulder — not gripping, not claiming, just being there.
Her breath caught in her ribs like it didn't know whether to live or collapse.
She lifted her head, lashes wet and trembling — and saw him.
Zenith.
Not golden.Not shadowed.Just there.
As if the universe paused long enough to say you were not imagining all of it.
His eyes held something tired — recognition trying to remember itself.
For a heartbeat, her grief loosened.
For a heartbeat, she wasn't alone in the room.
For a heartbeat—he was real.
"...don't go," she whispered — barely air, barely sound, more instinct than speech.
His expression shifted — a flicker of ache beneath calm, as though hearing those words hurt in a place he didn't know he had.
And then—
He thinned.
Not faded like light.Disappeared like thought.
A presence turning into memory again.A body dissolving into absence instead of space.
The warmth on her shoulder vanished.
Her hand shot up too late and grabbed nothing.
Silence filled the room like water rising.
Raylene stared at the place he had been, breath shaking, tears suspended on her lashes —
and the universe did not comfort her for trying to believe.
Only the air remained.
Only her heartbeat, too loud in a world that didn't promise witnesses.
Whatever he was — memory, ghost, glitch, dream —
he left her with the cruelest evidence:
warmth that shouldn't exist can disappear too.
And she did not cry louder.
Loneliness this deep never screams.
It just keeps existing.
Quiet.Unchosen.
---
Enduring.
---
There was no floor.
No room.No light pretending to understand her.
Raylene breathed — once, uncertain — and the world answered with nothing.
Darkness wasn't absence.It was memory without form.Her thoughts floated, detached from time, from body.
And then—
A soundless crack.
Not through air — through self.
The ground beneath her didn't break like stone.It fractured like a lie she had lived in too long.
Splinters of a world that once held her fell away, and gravity remembered she belonged to it.
She reached out — instinct, panic, hope — but her fingers closed around emptiness, like trying to grasp an unfinished sentence.
And she fell.
Not screaming.Just slipping, as though the universe exhaled and forgot to hold her in place.
Glass gave way to water.Dark, heavy, endless.
Not cold.Just final.
It wasn't drowning.It was un-being.
The gold in her skin — the last trace of whatever had made her feel real — bled into the water in slow, surrendering spirals.
Her limbs floated.Her hair drifted like a memory trying to escape gravity.
And then she felt it:
Not pain.Not fear.
A quiet undoing.
Like pages loosening from their spine, ink running, meaning dissolving because meaning belonged to people who were seen.
Her body didn't fight.
You can't fight when you don't know if you're allowed to exist.
A single bubble escaped her lips — so small, so human — and rose toward a surface she could no longer feel.
The last thought she had before dissolving was not a plea:
It was a question.
If he forgets me… am I gone?
Her outline softened.Her shape blurred.Her edges unmade themselves gently, as though kindness still mattered to the end.
And at the bottom of that impossible dark, she vanished into the water, not like death,
---
but like she was never written.
---
The abyss had taken her gently, like water folding over a flame.Not killed — unwritten.A memory washed clean of itself.
---
Then — a breath.
A cliff.Air thin and quiet.Stars drowning in the sky.
And the city — sprawling, glittering, far below like a universe pretending it still made sense.
She sat there as though she had always been sitting there.Hair glowing faintly, skin still threaded with the last gold of a world that almost forgot her.
That gold trembled.
Not with power — with fragility.The way sunlight trembles on a bubble right before it bursts.
Her eyes lifted toward the horizon.
The sun rose slowly — reverent, merciless, beautiful.
Not warmth.Not salvation.
Exposure.
The first ray kissed her cheek and the gold in her began to protest — a quiet shimmer like a heartbeat that didn't want to stop existing.
She touched her fingertips to the light.It passed through her skin like she wasn't completely solid anymore.
Her breath shivered.
"...don't fade," she whispered.
She wasn't begging the sun.
She was begging herself.
But the light did not answer kindly.
It didn't burn her — that would be mercy.It diluted her.
Gold strands of her hair dimming into dust-brown.Warm glow receding from her skin.The radiance that marked her as someone remembered…turning faint, then thin, then almost not there at all.
Color draining not like life —but like meaning.
Her hands shook in her lap, palms open, as though waiting for herself to gather back into them.
Nothing came.
Tears welled — not because she hurt, but because she could feel being forgotten again.Not by him —but by existence.
Her voice broke into the wind:
"I was here…"
The city didn't look up.The sky didn't pause.
But something — faint, unsure, trembling inside her ribs — whispered back, almost too small to be called a voice:
"Then stay."
The sun crested.
Her glow snapped —light scattering off her like dust in a gust.
And for a terrible second, she sat colorless —a sketch of a girl in a world that wasn't convinced she belonged.
The only thing real about her was the ache behind her eyes,and the desperate way her chest rose like breath was a tether to existence.
The horizon bathed everything in gold.
Except her.
Where that light touched her skin, she became grayscale —like she was being relegated to memory instead of moment.
She didn't scream.
She pressed her palms together, as if trying to remember how it felt to hold warmth.
A soft, shaking whisper slipped from her lips:
"Please… don't let me disappear."
She didn't know who she was speaking to.
The universe.
Herself.
Or him —wherever he was,whatever part of him might still feel the missing space where she once existed.
The wind moved.
The gold at the very edge of her form flickered —weak, stubborn, defiant.
She was not undone yet.
But she was close.
And for now, all she could do was sit at the edge of a world that didn't fully believe in her anymore…
…and try to believe in herself enough to remain.
---
She rises from the city cliff like someone who remembers how to stand only because gravity hasn't forgotten her yet.
No radiance left now.No gold.Just the shape of her — thin, muted, quiet.
The world doesn't hold its breath for her.It just… waits, the way empty places do.
She steps.Not toward anything — simply away from where she almost vanished.Feet sinking into cold earth, wind combing through hair that no longer catches light.
And then —the cliff changes.The city dissolves behind her like sand in dim water.
A new edge.Sharper.Lonelier.
Stone beneath her.The sea far below, endless gray breathing against rock.
She sits at its edge because sitting feels like the only thing she can still do without losing more of herself.
Ocean wind touches her face.It does not warm.It does not bite.It exists, indifferent and ancient.
Her eyes lower to her empty hands in her lap, palms slightly open, as if she is still expecting to feel something — warmth, memory, proof.
But there is nothing there to hold.
A flicker —
Not sound.Not vision.
A feeling.
Like the echo of a heartbeat pressed against her once.Arms around her, not tight — gentle, steady, inevitable.Foreheads touching.Breaths tangled.A world made of white fog and knowing.
His presence.
Not a face —just closeness.Just that impossible warmth.
And then—
Gone.
As if remembering it cost her too much.
Her breath collapses inward.Her fingers curl, but they do not find anything.The cliff does not move.The world does not argue.
She lowers her head.
Silence pours into her like water.
Her shoulders begin to shake first — the way grief enters a body that doesn't think it deserves to feel it.And finally, she lifts her hands to her face — not to hide, but to hold herself together.
A quiet sound escapes her —not a sob.Not a wail.
A breath breaking wrong.
Tears fall through her fingers, disappearing before they hit the stone.The universe does not even let her mark it.
And for a moment she is not girl or memory or dream or author or creation.
She is someone who once mattered enough to be held.
And she is someone the world did not save from forgetting.
When she cries, the ocean doesn't roar.It doesn't answer.
But the waves crash just a little closer — like a heartbeat drawing near, hesitant, searching.
Something — somewhere — remembers she existed.
Even if she doesn't know whether it's him,or the story that refuses to let her be gone.