It was raining the day Elya realized she might not exist.
She had been sitting at her kitchen table, watching the water streak the windows, when she
noticed an envelope that hadn’t been there before. It was her own stationery—creamcolored paper with a subtle texture, the kind she used for important correspondence. Her
name was written on the front in her own handwriting.
Six months had passed since her journey to Elsewhere, since her glimpse of a life she
might have lived in another branch of possibility. In that time, Elya had changed in ways
both subtle and profound. She had finished her novel—not The Woman Who Collected
Goodbyes, which belonged to another version of herself, but a new work titled Elsewhere,
about a woman who discovers that reality is more permeable, more multiple, than she had
ever imagined.
She had also, after weeks of debate with herself, sought out the Michael of her reality. She
had found him exactly as the other Michael had described—an architect living across the
city, single, with a cat named Dostoevsky. Their meeting had been different from the one in
that other branch of possibility—not a chance encounter in a bookstore but a deliberate
connection, facilitated by a mutual acquaintance Elya had discovered they shared.
The relationship that had developed was also different—slower, more cautious, shaped by
their specific circumstances and histories. This Michael had not experienced the instant
connection with Elya that his counterpart in the other reality had. He was more reserved,
more guarded, carrying the weight of past relationships that had ended poorly.
But there was something there, a potential, a possibility that was gradually being realized
through shared meals, long conversations, tentative revelations of self. Not a replica of
what Elya had glimpsed in that other reality, but something uniquely their own,
authentically theirs.
Now, sitting at her kitchen table with the unexpected envelope before her, Elya felt a
prickle of unease. The last time she had received a mysterious message, it had led to her
encounters with Leon, with the independent reflection, with the town called Elsewhere.
What new strangeness might this herald?
With a deep breath, she opened the envelope and removed the single sheet of paper
within. The message, like the address on the front, was in her own handwriting:
Dear Elya,
I have been waiting for you to leave, but you never do. You stay, collecting the goodbyes of
others, as if by gathering enough of them, you might finally craft one of your own.
But the truth is simpler and more terrible than that: You are not a collector of goodbyes—
you are a goodbye. You are the space left behind when someone departs, the echo of a
door closing, the impression of a body long since gone from the bed.
You were never here, because there was never a “here” for you to be. You are the dream I
had of having once been real.
Goodbye, Elya. It’s time for me to stop remembering you.
— E.
Elya read the letter seven times, her hands growing colder with each reading. She looked
up from the paper and surveyed her apartment—the furniture she had chosen, the books
she had read, the photographs of friends and family that lined the walls. Everything
seemed solid, substantial, real.
And yet.
And yet there was something insubstantial about it all, as if the edges of these objects
were less definite than they should be, as if they might dissolve if she looked at them too
directly or for too long.
She went to the bathroom and stood before the mirror, studying her reflection with new
eyes. The woman who looked back at her was familiar—dark hair cut in a bob that framed a
heart-shaped face, eyes the color of coffee, a small scar above her right eyebrow from a
childhood fall she remembered clearly.
Or did she? The memory suddenly seemed less like something she had experienced and
more like something she had been told—a story passed down, revised with each telling
until it bore only a passing resemblance to the original event.
“Who am I?” she asked her reflection.
The woman in the mirror smiled, a sad and knowing expression. Her lips moved, forming
words that Elya could read even though no sound emerged:
“You are everyone who has ever left me.”
Understanding dawned slowly, like a sunrise viewed through fog. The unanswered
questions that had haunted her for months suddenly resolved into a clarity so terrible it
took her breath away.
She was not Elya. Or rather, she was not only Elya. She was the collective memory of all the
people who had ever departed from the life of the real Elya—the woman who had written
the letter, the woman whose face she wore like a mask. She was the goodbye that had
never been properly said, the closure that had never been achieved, given form and
substance and a semblance of life.
She was never the one being left—she was the one who had never truly existed.
The realization should have devastated her. Instead, it brought a strange peace, the calm
acceptance of a truth that had always been there, waiting to be acknowledged.
She took the letter and placed it on the kitchen counter. She surveyed the apartment one
last time—not her apartment, never her apartment, but the mental reconstruction of a
place where the real Elya had once lived. She touched the walls, the furniture, the
photographs, saying a silent goodbye to each.
Then she opened the front door and stepped through, not into a hallway but into a vast,
formless space where no architecture existed, where there were no boundaries between
self and other, between memory and imagination, between existence and its opposite.
She did not look back. There was nothing to look back at.
She simply walked forward, each step dissolving a little more of what had never been, until
there was nothing left but the idea of a woman who had once collected goodbyes, only to
discover that she herself was the greatest goodbye of all.
2
In an apartment across the city—an apartment that had always existed, that had never
been a mental reconstruction or a figment of collective memory—the real Elya Merrick sat
at her desk, staring at the letter she had written to herself. Or rather, to the version of
herself that had been haunting her for years, the doppelgänger, the shadow-self, the
collection of all the pieces she had left behind.
She hadn’t expected the letter to work. It had been a therapy exercise, suggested by Dr.
Chen, who had been treating her for what he called “dissociative tendencies” since she
was a teenager. Write a letter to the part of yourself that feels separate, he had said.
Acknowledge it, then set it free.
Elya had written the letter months ago but had never sent it, never sealed it in an envelope,
never addressed it to herself. It had sat in a drawer in her desk, forgotten until this rainy
afternoon when she had been looking for a receipt and had found it instead.
Reading it now, she felt a strange sensation—not quite déjà vu but something adjacent to
it, a feeling that the letter had already been read, that its message had already been
received. By whom? By what? By the part of herself that had split off years ago, that had
been living a parallel life constructed from her memories and fears and abandoned
possibilities?
It seemed impossible, of course. Ridiculous. The stuff of fiction or psychosis, not of real
life. And yet, as she sat there in the gentle patter of rain against the windows, Elya felt a
shift, a subtle realignment, as if something that had been fractured was now whole again,
as if a burden she had been carrying for years had finally been set down.
She rose and went to the mirror, studying her reflection with a sense of integration she had
never experienced before. The woman who looked back at her was familiar—dark hair cut
in a bob that framed a heart-shaped face, eyes the color of coffee, a small scar above her
right eyebrow from a childhood fall.
But there was something different about her reflection, something fuller, more complete.
As if pieces that had been missing had been restored, as if aspects of herself that had been
set aside or rejected had been reclaimed and reintegrated.
Elya smiled, and the reflection smiled back, the movement synchronized, authentic,
whole. No sense of otherness, of separation, of a self divided against itself. Just a woman,
complex and contradictory and complete, containing within herself all the goodbyes she
had ever said and all the hellos she had yet to speak.
She returned to her desk and picked up the letter, intending to dispose of it now that it had
served its purpose. But as she reached for it, her eyes caught on a different piece of paper—a page from a manuscript she had been working on for months, a novel titled The
Woman Who Collected Goodbyes.
The page contained the final paragraph of the book, words she had written just the night
before:
“And in the end, she understood: She had never been collecting goodbyes at all. She had
been collecting the spaces between presence and absence, the moments of transition
when possibility collapsed into actuality. She had been collecting not endings but the
potential for new beginnings that exists within every farewell. And now, finally, she was
ready to begin.”
Elya read the words, feeling their resonance, their truth. She had spent so much of her life
focused on departures, on the moment when someone begins to leave but hasn’t yet
completely gone. Now, for the first time, she found herself looking forward to arrivals, to
the moment when someone begins to enter her life but hasn’t yet fully arrived.
She picked up her phone and scrolled to a contact she had added recently: Michael Adler,
an architect she had met at a gallery opening two weeks ago. They had talked for hours,
had exchanged numbers, had texted back and forth but hadn’t yet arranged to meet again.
Taking a deep breath, Elya typed a message: “Coffee tomorrow? I know a place where they
price the drinks according to how good the conversation is. Ours should be free.”
She hit send before she could second-guess herself, before the part of her that had always
collected goodbyes could intervene and prevent this hello from being spoken.
The reply came almost immediately: “Sounds perfect. Name the time and place, and I’ll be
there.”
Elya smiled, a genuine expression that contained both joy and a touch of apprehension.
This wasn’t a goodbye but a beginning, a step into possibility rather than a retreat into memory. It was unfamiliar territory for someone who had spent her life collecting endings,
but it felt right, necessary, inevitable.
Outside, the rain began to taper off, the clouds parting to reveal patches of blue sky. Elya
went to the window and looked out at the city, at the people moving along the sidewalks,
entering and exiting buildings, appearing and disappearing around corners. How many
meetings were happening at this very moment? How many first words spoken, how many
initial glances exchanged, how many doors opening for the first time?
She thought briefly of the other Elya, the collection of all her abandoned parts, the goodbye
she had finally managed to say. Was she truly gone? Had she ever really existed? Or had
she been merely a psychological construct, a way for Elya to process her own
fragmentation, her own sense of incompleteness?
In the end, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that Elya felt whole now, integrated, ready
to move forward rather than constantly looking back. Ready to start collecting hellos
instead of goodbyes.
She turned away from the window and went to her bookshelf, where a slim volume of
poetry caught her eye—the same book she had purchased from Leon’s shop, Endings &
Beginnings, years ago. She had never finished reading it, had set it aside after a few pages,
finding its exploration of absence and loss too close to her own preoccupations.
Now, she took it down and opened it to the final poem, reading the last lines that Leon had
priced so highly:
“The spaces between us are not empty; they are filled with all the words we never said.”
Elya closed the book, holding it for a moment against her chest, feeling its solidity, its
reality. Then she returned it to the shelf and went to prepare for tomorrow, for coffee with
Michael, for whatever beginnings might arise from that meeting.Behind her, in the mirror she had just walked away from, her reflection lingered for a
moment longer than it should have, watching her go with eyes that held both farewell and
welcome, both ending and beginning, both goodbye and hello.
Then it too turned and departed, leaving the mirror empty, reflecting only the room, the
books, the desk with its letter and manuscript, the window with its view of a city where
people were constantly arriving and departing, meeting and parting, saying hello and
goodbye in an endless cycle of connection and separation.
The mirror, like Elya herself, was now just what it appeared to be, nothing more and nothing
less. A surface that reflected reality, not a boundary between worlds or a portal to other
possibilities. Just glass and silver, showing what stood before it and nothing else.
Outside, the sun broke through the clouds completely, casting a golden light across the
city, illuminating the wet streets and buildings with a glow that made everything seem both
more real and more dreamlike, both more solid and more ephemeral.
In that light, Elya moved through her apartment, touching objects, looking at photographs,
preparing for tomorrow and all the tomorrows that would follow. No longer the woman who
collected goodbyes, but simply a woman, complex and contradictory and complete, ready
to collect whatever experiences life might offer, whether beginnings or endings or the
infinite gradations that exist between them.