This story is by Krystle Van Roekel and was part of our 2024 Fall Writing Contest. You can find all the writing contest stories here.
And so the rain came, and the cruelty of finality with it. The ending of too much, of what should have only been the start. His hand in my drenched hair, my name scorched across his mouth. And I felt every passing second as if it were an hour, felt the thinning string of my remembrance pull.
Strain.
Tear.
Snap.
My hand slows, the scratching of my pencil growing quiet. I draw back from my notebook, a cramp stiffening my knuckles, and reach for my tea. It is barely half gone, even after four hours, and it’s cold. I forgot to drink it.
Rain taps rhythmically at the window across the room. I’m tempted to get up and go peer behind the thin, white lace curtain and let in the wet, beaded air, but I know that if I do, I’ll forget.
A breath parts my quivering lips. My hands are trembling, too. Just a little bit. I shut my eyes a moment and tug my dark hair back into a knot. I can think clearer when it’s away from my face.
“Come on, Elise,” I whisper to myself. I’ve done this once before. I imagined my words did the impossible, once. They can do it again. I just have to remember them.
I take my pencil to the page again.
“Don’t leave. Not yet.”
There was a pleading in his rain-colored eyes. He stood before me, and I could not breathe.
“Dance with me, Elise.”
He stretched out both hands to me. I couldn’t help laughing, our smiles meeting like old friends, while I pretended as if the inevitable wasn’t rushing toward me.
Did he know? Did he remember? Did he understand what I was really doing, why I had searched so tirelessly for him again?
I don’t remember writing those questions before.
“I can’t dance, Keaton, remember?”
The ripple of the bitter-tasting word. When I did not know that I was the one who would not remember.
I don’t think I wrote that the first time, either.
“I’ll show you how.” He didn’t waver. He came closer, put one arm round me, and lowered his head, his light hair darkened by the downpour.
“Tell me,” he said against my hairline, voice warm and fond,“what price would you pay to make a moment last a lifetime?”
Tears or rain on my lashes? I didn’t know. “Anything,” I whispered. What wouldn’t I give? “I would pay whatever it took to be with you.”
His smile was as bright and clear as his eyes.
The divide between dimensions split open, and a sound like thunder ripped him away from me.
I blink; a sense of familiarity and deja vu flare hot. I know this. I feel this. I wrote this.
“Finish it, Elise,” I tell myself. The tears are quiet on my face. I have to remember it all, so I can finish it.
So it will be as if he is with me again.
As if I have any control over this.
A blinding light shattered the air around us, fiery wind snatching at my hair, my dress. I flung my hands over my face, I heard myself cry out. Keaton shouted my name.
Then came the realization. The understanding.“It’s here!” I called to him, reaching blindly through the light until my fingers found his. “It’s right here, Keaton!”
“What’s here?”
His voice was wild with confusion, with fear. But I gazed into that light and wind with something I could only name as joy.
I had found it. The coalescence of reality and fantasy, the place where fiction and nonfiction met. The ink between the pages.
There is heat at my palms, against the pages, and the rain is pounding in my ears. But I am remembering more and more, now.
I am the author of this story. I wrote this once.
I keep going.
Both of Keaton’s hands were in mine. I could feel him pressing close to me, the pressure of the wind forcing us closer together. “What is this, Elise?” He called.
“Our way home,” I said. He probably couldn’t see me smiling, but I still turned to try and find his eyes anyway. “You can come with me.”
“What?”
My heart thrashes against my ribs. I don’t remember the heartbreak in his voice, the hurt and confusion shuttering his expression, from before. I close my eyes as if that will make it easier not to look at him. My pencil is flying frantically. The corner of the lined paper rips as I turn too fast to the next one. Tears are falling with the rain. I don’t think I could stop now even if I wanted to.
“You can come back home with me, where I’m from!”
His grip on my fingers loosened, and a sort of panic took hold of me. I grappled for his hand again. “Keaton?”
“I can’t.”
His words came quiet at my ear. Slow, methodical beats of my pulse drowned out the rushing of the wind.
“Elise, I can’t.”
Desperation wrapped strangling fingers around my throat. “What—what do you mean?”
“Elise…”
“You asked me!” I was weeping now, over the wind. His forehead pressed against mine, his palms cupping my face. “You asked me,” I said again, “what I would pay to make a moment last a lifetime—this is it! I’ve given you all of me. I’ve poured everything out. I’ve held nothing back.”
“But how much of this is real? How much…” He paused, and I felt the warmth of his breath on my mouth. “How much of this is… just a recollection?”
I could see his eyes. The light was fading. The split between our worlds, dying out.
“Why can’t it be both?” I pleaded. “Please, Keaton. I…”
His lips found mine, and I sank against him.
“You have to go back home, Elise,” he whispered against my mouth. “You have to let go.”
He held me steadily as my knees buckled. I couldn’t do this.
“I can’t say goodbye again,” I wept. “Not again. I tried…”
“Elise,” he whispered. His arms tightened around me. His voice broke tenderly. “You can’t stay here. You have to find what is real.”
“You are real to me.”
“Keep living.”
“Please, Keaton…”
“I love you.”
“Keaton,” I sobbed.
“Let go, Elise.”
Thunder cracks, harsh and unyielding.
I jerk upright. The pencil falls from my hand, and I crumble, then, over the words that carry a magic I thought I knew.
There aren’t any more.
“I remember,” I cry out loud. “I remember you every day, so I wrote it all again.” I pound my hand at the unrelenting words before me. “I wrote it again! I wrote you again. I found you, I found you again…”
But it didn’t end this way before. Before… before, I forgot myself. Before, I wrote myself into the story, and it was real. I thought…I felt it was real. I wrote Keaton to life, because… because he wasn’t alive, anymore.
Because he isn’t.
Silence falls, abrupt as the reality snaking around my mind. The rain has softened. And I’m staring across the room, at the photograph in its frame where it perches on the bookshelf.
It was raining the day we took our engagement photos nearly two months ago. Raining the day he proposed to me. Raining the day his mom frantically called me. Raining the day of the car accident.
I am brought low, made nothing, by the weight of grief.
“I brought you back,” I whisper desperately. “This was my chance. I was… I was bringing you back.”
But Keaton is gone.
A streak of sunlight slips past my curtain, catches in the corner of my eye. The clouds are lifting.
“Keep living.”
I reach for my story notebook and trace the words I can imagine him saying.
“Let go.”
My phone chimes cheerfully with a text from my mom; I must’ve forgotten she was coming over tonight.
Something of the heat falls away and I fill my lungs with a clear breath.
Keaton loved my stories. He loved me. The memory of him is knife-sharp and achingly soft all at once. How… powerful, to be able to write such love. To have known such love.
“Let go.”
I didn’t write it this way the first time. I remember that now. The first time, my character stayed with him there, but I never finished the story, and I misplaced the notebook somehow. I couldn’t… remember.
But I remember now. My recollections are stained and blurred, but they are there.
I take hold of my pencil and turn to a new page. I smooth it out.
Then I write:
Here is a truth. My memories are close and distant all at once, and my love is gone. Nothing I write can bring him back.
But I will not forget him again. I will remember. And maybe… maybe someday… I will be alright.
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