4

As days passed and her body healed, her mind remained in fragments. The memories didn’t feel like dreams anymore. They felt like lives she had lived. People she had known. Places she had been. A loop she had finally broken free from.

And yet, something still lingered.

On her fourth day of recovery, when the hospital hallway was quiet and the light turned golden through the window, she felt a strange pull. She slipped out of bed, bare feet cold on the tiled floor, and walked until she reached the hospital’s small garden an isolated patch surrounded by iron gates and humming plants.

There, on the bench beneath the gnarled cherry tree, sat the woman in the black dress.

The same woman from the train.

She wasn’t blurred anymore. Her features were clear soft, familiar, almost like an older version of herself. Their eyes locked.

“I was waiting,” the woman said calmly, her voice echoing across realities.

She froze. “Who are you?”

The woman smiled sadly. “You know me. Or at least… you knew who I used to be. We share the same pain. The same memory. The same soul.”

The key in her hand burned gently. She sat down across from the woman, her heart racing and yet, somehow steady.

“The train,” she whispered. “What was it?”

The woman looked toward the clouds, eyes distant. “A crossing. A transition between what you forget and what you must remember. Between life… and the things we leave behind to protect ourselves.”

“But it felt real.”

“It was. Just not in the way you think.”

Silence bloomed between them.

“I kept seeing the missing poster… with my face. Why?” she asked.

“Because a part of you was missing,” the woman said softly. “The part that needed to remember, to forgive herself. You were stuck between denial and pain. That station, the train—it was your mind's way of forcing you to confront what you buried.”

Tears welled in her eyes. “But I don’t even know what I forgot…”

“You do,” the woman whispered, reaching out and placing a warm hand on hers.

And just like that, the memories hit her like a flood:

A best friend who vanished during childhood, playing at the same station. The guilt she carried. A mother lost in an accident that occurred the night she took a train alone. A scream in the distance. Blood on metal. The inability to distinguish what was her fault and what was fate. She had locked it all away. Suppressed. Forgotten.

The key wasn’t to a door. It was to her memory. To her truth.

She gasped as tears fell freely, her chest heaving as decades of sorrow poured out of her. The woman in black embraced her.

“You remembered,” she whispered.

“I was scared,” she admitted. “I thought if I opened it all… I’d lose myself.”

“But you did lose yourself,” the woman replied gently. “Now you’re finding her again.”

When she looked again, the woman was gone. Only the cherry tree remained, its blossoms dancing in the wind like old whispers set free.

---One Year Later---

As she walked through the old train station again, no longer abandoned. It had been restored as part of a heritage project, reopened for visitors. Clean floors. Repainted signs. No ghosts.

Or so people believed.

She moved slowly past the platform, now wrapped in golden sunlight, not shadows. Her fingers brushed against the metal railing, the scent of rust long replaced with fresh air.

The poster board was new too, with old articles displayed for history buffs. Among them, she found one headline:

“Local Girl Found After Mysterious Disappearance No Clues Uncovered.”

She touched the glass gently, smiled faintly, and walked away.

In her purse was the key. She no longer needed it, but she kept it to get the reminder. Her truth. Her freedom.

That night, she sat at her writing desk, pen gliding over pages with a clarity she never had before. She wasn’t writing fiction anymore. She was writing her. Her journey. Her recovery. The

journey towards her pain to towards her healing. she pours all her sorrows, pain, journey, those tragic accident, loss, cries, everything in words making it a lesson to others, to not do the same mistake she did in her life, which can be the reason of something tragic not now but maybe in future.

As she wrote down everything in those sheet of paper's, all she wanted was to aware everyone before its too late. She make sure to write in in a beautiful way so whoever reads it will always remember it like its a part of life instead of thinking it as a threat and in end she named it "BETWEEN DEATH AND DREAM".

Somewhere, A Train Still Waits

A boy about seventeen sat alone on a cracked bench, an old station barely kept alive by time and weather. He clutched a folded newspaper article in one hand and a worn key in the other. His eyes were hollow, full of something he didn’t understand, and his breathing was uneven—like he was waiting for something to pull him under.

The clock above him ticked.

11:44 PM.

The wind rustled past, cold and eerie.

And then, like a whisper from another realm… the sound of a train horn echoed faintly in the distance.

He looked up.

His ticket fluttered from his coat pocket.

The Cycle, Broken or Reborn?

In a small apartment lit by the golden haze of early morning, she stirred from her dream. Her breath was steady, but her heart pounded. She knew that feeling. The station. The key. The clock.

She stood, walked to the drawer where she used to keep it

but the key wasn’t there anymore. She had left it in the tree, years ago.

Still, something tugged at her heart. A gentle ache, a distant memory trying to speak.

She walked to her desk, pulled out a fresh page, and began writing again:

"If the 11:45 comes again, I hope they choose differently. I hope they come back, like I did."

{A Note From Bora Roselynn}

There will always be a station between memory and madness. A place where time distorts, where guilt speaks louder than logic, where shadows hold stories. But if you listen carefully, not with fear, but with understanding you’ll hear the silence shift, you'll find the answer within it.

A train doesn’t always mean escape.

Sometimes… it means a Return.

Not to the past.

But to yourself. So you can not just escape but face it and set yourself free from it, though it means pain, sorrow, cries but the result will bring the forever peace towards your heart.

but its up to you to decide whether you want to take the train just to escape through it or take it so you can free yourself from it.

Just Think Before Taking Any Decision's.

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