She had already died once in an age when humans were not yet called "humans," when language had not been born, and fire was still a divine miracle.
Nobody remembered her name—because in that era, the concept of "names" simply did not exist.
She remembered only one thing:
She had loved a girl.
A love so deep that as long as the girl lived, the world had meaning—
as if she had been born solely to meet her.
Later, she died.
She stood beside her own corpse, watching her body being buried in the soil.
No funeral.
No tears.
Only helplessness—
a shell left behind.
Not long after, the girl she loved followed her into death.
She thought death would be the end of everything.
But it wasn't.
They became ghosts—unable to speak to the living, drifting like mist.
They met other wandering souls, learned from them, lived beside them.
At first, they believed all ghosts would remain in that eternal, unchanging state.
Then one day, one of the ghosts vanished.
No sign, no farewell.
Just—gone.
She later learned the word for it: reincarnation.
One by one, their ghostly friends were "taken away."
They cried, resisted, trembled.
But still, each eventually disappeared.
Finally, even the girl she loved reincarnated.
Only she was left behind.
She never understood why she could not reincarnate.
So she began a journey to find her beloved.
Across countless ages, she watched humanity form nations, advance in technology, step into space—
yet she never found the reincarnated girl.
She searched through battlefields of corpses, ages of plague, modern cities—
again and again confirming the wrong person,
again and again being disappointed.
Until—
One day.
In the flood of digital messages, she sensed a presence so familiar that her soul trembled.
It was her.
Her lover, reborn.
---
2:17 AM.
My phone lit up by itself.
I hadn't set an alarm.
No notifications.
No sounds.
Yet the screen glowed softly in the dark room.
I stared for a few seconds, a strange anxiety rising in my chest.
Then, the messaging app opened by itself.
No account.
No name.
No avatar.
Only one line of text slowly appeared:
—"I finally found you."
I froze.
It wasn't a prank—no one I knew would send something like this at this hour.
I hesitated, then replied with a question mark.
The answer came instantly:
—"You're sitting on your bed. Your back is against the wall. The window is on your left. On your right, there's a pile of unfolded clothes."
I snapped my head to the right.
Completely accurate.
My phone vibrated again:
—"Lean back a little. You'll feel cold."
I didn't know why I complied.
The next second—
a chill gently pressed against my back.
Not air conditioning.
Not wind.
But the unmistakable sensation of someone standing behind me—
someone I could not see.
I spoke with a trembling voice:
"…Who are you?"
The screen paused for a few seconds.
Then, word by word, the answer appeared:
—"I am the ghost who was supposed to reincarnate, but never did."
A short silence.
Then another line:
—"And I am the only one in this world who still remembers who you were… in your past life."
Every hair on my body stood on end.
The window was shut.
There was no wind.
Yet the room felt wrapped in a longing that had crossed millennia.
I didn't know whether to run—
or turn around.
I only knew one thing:
From this moment on,
my life would never again return to the state of "being alone."