Elina wakes up to the silence, the type that lives, pressing against the walls and slithering between the shelves. It isn't vacant, simply awaiting occupancy.
Her body feels heavy with the throbbing head, as if she has been asleep for days. Her eyes sweep across the unknown room, rows and rows of books fill the space, with the hazy titles refusing to settle.
Individuals wander amid them. Certain mumbling to themselves, whereas others are sketching words in the vacuum, as if they are attempting to recall how they once sounded.
Intrigued, she strolls to the nearby area that appears to be a dining hall, with few people peering hard at something as if their existence relies on it.
Weirdly offsetting.
Elina quickens her steps, in the scent of exit. But it isn’t until something or someone catches her gaze, eliciting an uneasy feeling, whose appearance resembles hers, both visually and socially.
Thrilled, she approaches her doppelganger with steady steps and a perplexed, curious pulsating heart.
Before she can question, “You know me," the woman asserts, sensing Elina's arrival, her voice empty and phrase divisive.
“I was you, once.”
Elina stumbles back, her heart pounding against her ribs, echoing the unbelievable.
She has a life, memories. A solid existence and thoughts, and habits of her own. A loving husband, an adorable. But why is she unable to recall the memories of childhood?
Doesn’t matter; her existence is real, and this nightmare is nothing more than a fleeting illusion. But what about the person in front of her with the thin and blurry appearance?
Sensing the lines of confusion on Elina’s forehead, she adds, “I came first”, voice stripped of any warmth and eyes reflecting dullness. “Three pages. That’s all I had, and was discarded into the dustbin, replaced by you.”
Crap, Elina pinches herself, a failed attempt to wake herself up from a non-existing dream.
As time moves forward, a pit forms in her heart, swallowing her in the abyss of dreadful thoughts, where the escape is just another synonym of illusion. Has she been discarded?
Her moments of love, her happily ever afters, were just an illusion. Pressed moments echoing in the draft, never meant to meet an end.
The people, her people, will never realise the disappearance of her. They will carry on, wrapped in their lives of love, while she will yearn to be real, to be with them.
With the denial steps, she bolts forward in any and every direction, looking for the exit. The floor beneath her recedes, stretching the distance, unable to cover. The surrounding shifts with her every step, deforming itself.
“There is no escape”, a voice whispers behind her. When the deformation stops, a cottage appears in her gaze.
She strides in the direction of the cottage, each step filled with desperation, and discovers the author. She runs to her creator, pleading with her to complete her existence, the only force that can make her fate permanent. A plea to be a being.
“Please write me, just- just don’t erase. I don’t deserve death. I have life, people to live for.” All to deaf ears.
The author just takes a glimpse of her, frustrated, mumbling curses to the laptop, her fingers moving on the keyboard, irritated with its habit of hanging.
“What’s wrong?” The author whispers, curiosity lining her voice.
Sensing the author’s cruel intention, Elina grabs a pen and forces her shivering fingers to grip and write in an attempt to make her story come to an end, to make herself real.
A Happily Ever After. But the ink, instead of being absorbed by the page, slides down it, causing the phrases to float on the floor.
“I exist”, “I have a life”, “I have a family who needs me.”
Author’s screen glitches—lines of text stuttering, freezing, and hanging her computer on an unfinished file.
“I exist”, “I have a life”, “I have a family who needs me.”
A corrupted draft file.
A file that refuses to leave the screen.
"I don’t know what’s wrong with this one," she murmurs, voice detached.
And then— She deletes it.
As the author presses delete, Elina feels the hollowness within her hands, her voice slowing. She is disappearing, not just disappearing, but unbeing.
“Don’t erase me, please, don’t please.” She wails loudly, but her words reach nowhere.
The author, her creator, doesn’t even remember her.
Elina disappears, and becomes the reason for n numbers of failed and forgotten characters' disappearances.
No one will remember them, not even their people with whom they shared the fleeting joy and sorrows.
The forgotten lives. Forgotten Names and Memories.
No trace of their existence.
Silence fills the room, just like before.
No characters, just the rows of books, unchanged.
A sharp inhale of someone.
A new failed character
A new character in the room of drafts, scared and lost. All alone with the loving memories of his life of 15 pages.
Looking for the exit, for waking up from the dream, soon to be a nightmare of his sole existence.
Waiting to be deleted soon.
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