Part Two: The One Who Stay

The cold doesn’t bother me anymore.

Not now.

Not after knowing I’ve been dead for thirty years.

I stand beside my car—my once beloved sky-blue hatchback—parked forever at the edge of Whisper Lane. No rust eats away at its body. No time moves forward here. It’s frozen like me… stuck in the echo of a night that never ends.

Across the road, the pale couple sits silently on a stone bench beneath a dying weeping willow. They look as they always do—still, sad, almost peaceful. She still clutches her suitcase. He still wears the same timid expression, glancing over his shoulder for a mob that never really fades.

We don’t speak. We don’t need to.

We are ghosts of a memory that plays itself endlessly.

I try to scream sometimes. Not in fear—there’s none of that left. But in frustration. In longing.

I want to remember.

I want to be real again.

I walk.

The gravel doesn’t crunch under my feet anymore. It sighs, like the land is tired of remembering. The moonlight glows in patches between the twisted branches overhead. A raven watches from a crooked tombstone, its feathers too still, too dark. It blinks slowly. It’s been watching me for years.

I find myself at the far end of the cemetery, drawn there by something deeper than memory—like a thread tugging at what’s left of my soul.

Past the broken gates, past the fence wound in barbed ivy, I find it.

My grave.

Covered in leaves, nearly swallowed by earth and time. But my name still whispers from the stone:

Aanya Mehra

1971 – 1995

“Gone too soon. Forever missed.”

A chill passes through me.

Not from cold.

From recognition.

This is where I began to forget.

There’s a photo tucked into the stone’s corner—me, alive. Smiling. Eyes full of something I can’t even name anymore.

I kneel.

The wind picks up, curling around me like a question, rattling the trees above. They creak like old bones. The stars seem to flicker slower here. Time hangs thick.

I see flashes again—my mother lighting a diya every year on this day. My friend tying a black ribbon around a tree by this road. Strangers placing flowers on my grave though they never knew me.

I was not forgotten.

But I stayed.

Because I forgot myself.

Most people don’t even know Whisper Lane exists. They avoid it, take longer routes, call it cursed.

They’re not wrong.

The road hums with sorrow.

It’s full—not of monsters, but of moments that never finished.

Of love that never escaped.

Of fear that never ended.

Of lives that were cut short and never stitched back together.

We are the ones who stayed.

We’re not here to harm.