The map showed a town called Elsewhere, located in the fold between two states, a place easy to miss unless you were looking for it specifically. Elya wasn’t looking for it. She was simply driving, putting distance between herself and the apartment with its treacherous mirrors, when she saw the exit sign and, on impulse, turned off the highway. Since the departure of her reflection—or the other Elya, or whatever name could be given to the entity that had taken with it so much of what had once made her whole—Elya had felt increasingly hollow, a shell moving through life by routine and habit rather than genuine engagement. Colors seemed duller, food less flavorful, music less moving. It was as if she were experiencing everything through a layer of gauze, the world muffled and distant. Work, once a source of satisfaction if not actual joy, had become merely a way to fill hours that would otherwise stretch empty before her. Friends, never numerous but once valued, now seemed like characters in a play she was too tired to follow closely. Even her apartment, once a carefully curated sanctuary, felt foreign, the belongings within it props rather than possessions. So she had taken a leave of absence from her job, packed a small suitcase, and started driving with no particular destination in mind. Just away. Away from the place where she had lost something essential, where she had said goodbye to a part of herself she hadn’t known she still had until it was gone.
The road narrowed as she followed the exit, trees crowding close on either side, branches forming a tunnel that filtered the sunlight into dappled patterns across the hood of her car. After several miles, the forest gave way to open fields, and Elya saw the town in the distance: a cluster of buildings nestled in the hollow of a valley, smoke rising from a few chimneys despite the warmth of the day. As she drew closer, she noticed the first oddity: the welcome sign at the town’s edge was blank, the space where the name should have been an empty rectangle of weathered wood. The population count below it was similarly vacant—not zero, just absent, as if the inhabitants had collectively decided to stop being counted. Elya slowed her car, studying the sign with a frown. Had it been vandalized? Was this some statement of privacy or independence by a community that didn’t want to be found on maps or counted in censuses? She drove on, entering the town proper. It was small but not tiny—a main street lined with shops, residential streets branching off at right angles, a park at the center with a bandstand and benches. Normal enough at first glance, but as Elya parked her car and began to walk, she noticed other oddities. The storefronts had no names, just generic designations: “Grocery,” “Hardware,” “Café.” The street signs were similarly blank, marking intersections without naming what crossed there. Even the local newspaper, displayed in a box outside the café, had no title, just the date—a Tuesday in June, though Elya could have sworn it was September. Elya parked on the main street, a wide avenue lined with storefronts that reminded her of film sets—convincing from a distance but somehow insubstantial up close, as if they might fold flat at any moment. People moved along the sidewalks, engaged in the ordinary business of life, but their movements had a rehearsed quality, like actors who had performed the same scene so many times they no longer needed to think about it. She entered a café, where an elderly waitress with papery skin and eyes the color of weak tea brought her coffee without being asked. “Welcome to…” the waitress began, then frowned, a flicker of confusion crossing her face. “Welcome,” she amended, setting down the cup with a hand that trembled slightly. “You’re new.” “I’m just passing through,” Elya said. “What’s the name of this town? The sign was blank.”
The waitress’s frown deepened. “It’s…” She looked around, as if the answer might be written on the walls or the faces of the other patrons. “It’s where we live,” she finally said, with the air of someone who has solved a difficult puzzle. “Yes, but what do you call it?” Elya pressed. “What address do you put on letters?” The waitress’s expression became distressed, like a child confronted with a question it can’t answer but feels it should. “We don’t get many letters,” she said. “Mostly we just talk to each other. Would you like some pie? The blueberry is good today.” Elya accepted the change of subject, recognizing that her questions were causing the woman genuine discomfort. She ordered the pie, which was indeed good—the blueberries tart and sweet in perfect balance, the crust flaky and buttery. As she ate, she observed the other customers, all of whom seemed simultaneously ordinary and slightly off, like familiar words pronounced with an unfamiliar accent. They chatted and ate and drank coffee, normal activities in a normal café. But when Elya listened more carefully to their conversations, she noticed something strange: they never used proper nouns. No names for people, places, or things that would normally have distinct identifiers. It was all “he” and “she” and “they,” “here” and “there” and “over by the thing.” And yet they understood each other perfectly, as if they shared a private language where specificity was unnecessary, where the particular had been smoothly absorbed into the general. After finishing her pie, Elya paid—leaving money on the table rather than at a register, as seemed to be the custom—and continued her exploration of the nameless town. Throughout the day, she asked the same question of everyone she met. The bank teller who had worked there for forty years but couldn’t recall when he had started. The librarian who showed her maps where the town appeared as an unnamed dot, the surrounding roads leading to it like rivers to a nameless sea. The children playing in the park who looked at her with ancient eyes and said, “It’s just home.” No one could tell her the name of the town. No one seemed to find this strange. They all claimed to have always been there, but none could remember arriving. By late afternoon, Elya found herself at the town’s small museum, a single-room affair displaying artifacts of local history—photographs of buildings being constructed, of parades and picnics and graduations. But like everything else in the town, these images lacked specificity. No captions identifying people or dates. No explanatory text putting events in context. Just images, floating free of the anchors that would normally tether them to a particular time and place.
The museum’s curator, a middle-aged man with spectacles and a cardigan despite the warmth of the day, approached as Elya studied a photograph of what appeared to be the town’s founding ceremony. “Interesting, isn’t it?” he said, gesturing toward the image. “The beginning of everything.” “When was this taken?” Elya asked. The curator tilted his head, considering. “Before,” he said finally. “Before now.” “That’s not very specific,” Elya said, unable to keep a note of frustration from her voice. The curator smiled, an expression of genuine warmth and a total lack of concern. “Specific to what?” he asked, as if the concept itself was puzzling. “It happened. That’s enough, isn’t it?” Before Elya could respond, the curator moved away, greeting another visitor with the same gentle smile and murmured welcome. Elya turned back to the photograph, studying it more closely. The people in the image—men in suits and hats, women in long dresses, all gathered around a cornerstone or marker of some kind—seemed familiar somehow, though she was certain she had never seen them before. Then she realized: they looked like older versions of the children she had seen playing in the park, and younger versions of the elderly she had encountered in the café and the bank. As if everyone in the town existed simultaneously at all ages, as if time here was not a line but a circle, with no clear beginning or end. She left the museum feeling disoriented, her sense of reality slipping a little further with each unanswered question, each encounter that defied normal expectations. The sun was beginning to set, casting long shadows across the streets and buildings, giving the town a golden glow that softened its edges and deepened its mysteries. As evening fell, Elya found herself at the town’s edge, where the last houses gave way to fields. A woman stood there, dressed entirely in black, her face obscured by a veil that stirred gently in the breeze. She was laying flowers at the base of a stone marker that bore no inscription. “You’re not from here,” the woman said as Elya approached. It wasn’t a question. “No,” Elya agreed. “I’m just passing through.” “No one is just passing through,” the woman said. She lifted her veil, revealing a face that might have been twenty or sixty, features that shifted in the fading light. “You are here to say goodbye to something you have not yet lost.” The woman’s words sent a chill through Elya, resonating with her recent experiences in ways she couldn’t fully articulate. “What does that mean?” she asked.
But the woman only smiled, a sad expression that conveyed neither joy nor amusement, and replaced her veil. “The town will be gone tomorrow,” she said. “It always is.” “I don’t understand,” Elya said, but even as she spoke, she felt a strange certainty that the woman’s words were true, that this place—whatever it was, whatever it was called—existed only provisionally, a temporary arrangement of buildings and people that would dissipate with the morning light. “Understanding isn’t necessary,” the veiled woman said. “Just remember: what is forgotten isn’t necessarily gone. It merely exists elsewhere, in a place beyond naming.” With these cryptic words, the woman turned and walked away, moving with the fluid grace of someone much younger than her appearance suggested. Elya watched her go, questions crowding in her mind, until the gathering darkness swallowed the woman’s retreating figure. That night, Elya stayed in a small inn where the guestbook contained pages of signatures but no names, only dates that stretched back impossibly far. She slept fitfully, dreaming of a city that disassembled itself building by building, the inhabitants calmly dismantling their homes and carrying the pieces away, leaving nothing behind but the impression of their footprints in the earth. 2 Elya woke to stillness. Not the ordinary quiet of early morning, but a profound absence of sound that felt almost physical, a pressure on her eardrums. She rose and went to the window, drawing back the curtains to reveal a landscape transformed. Where the town had been, there was only open land, rolling gently toward the horizon. No buildings, no roads, no sign that human habitation had ever existed there. Only footprints in the dirt, leading away in all directions, as if the town’s inhabitants had scattered to the winds. Her inn room was gone too. She found herself standing in a field of tall grass, the morning dew soaking through her clothes. Her suitcase sat at her feet, the only evidence that she had not imagined the entire episode. And there, a few steps away, was a small stone marker, identical to the one where the veiled woman had laid flowers. It was still unmarked, but when Elya touched it, she felt words beneath her fingertips, like braille that could only be read by the skin, not the eyes: “You were never here.” The phrase, identical to the one she had received on her birthday, sent a shock of recognition through her. Was there a connection? Had the unsigned letter been an invitation, a summons to this place that existed only provisionally, this town that forgot itself each morning? Elya looked around, trying to orient herself in the emptied landscape. In the distance, she could see the highway where she had exited the day before. Her car was parked nearby, though she had left it on the town’s main street. Everything else—the café, the bank, the museum, the park with its ancient-eyed children—was gone, as if it had never been. Or perhaps it was Elya who had never been here, as the marker suggested. She picked up her suitcase, moved to her car, and placed the bag in the trunk. Then, instead of returning to the highway, she began to walk across the field, following a set of footprints that seemed more defined than the others, more recently made. The trail led her to a small grove of trees that she hadn’t noticed before, a pocket of shadow and stillness in the otherwise open landscape. As she approached, she saw that the trees formed a perfect circle, their branches intertwining overhead to create a natural dome, a green cathedral f illed with dappled light. In the center of the grove stood a woman—not the veiled woman from the previous evening, but someone Elya recognized with a shock of disbelief: the other Elya, the independent reflection who had taken with her so much of what had once made Elya whole. “You,” Elya said, the word emerging as a breath. The other Elya smiled, a gentle expression that held no malice, only a kind of patient waiting. “Me,” she agreed. “Or you. Or parts of both of us.” “What is this place?” Elya asked, gesturing around at the grove, at the empty fields beyond where a town had stood the night before. “What’s happening?” “This is Elsewhere,” the other Elya said. “The place that exists in the spaces between, in the gaps and interstices of what you call reality. A place for all the forgotten and abandoned parts of people, all the discarded possibilities, all the roads not taken.” “The town last night—” “A manifestation,” the other Elya explained. “A temporary arrangement of possibilities, a collection of all the places that have been forgotten, that have lost their names and their specificity but still exist in the memory of those who once knew them.” “And the people?” Elya asked, thinking of the waitress with her papery skin, the curator with his cardigan, the children with their ancient eyes. “The same,” the other Elya said. “Forgotten fragments of selves, discarded aspects of identities, all the parts of people that have been set aside or abandoned in the course of a life. They gather here, in Elsewhere, creating temporary communities, temporary realities, until they’re remembered again or forgotten completely.” Elya tried to process this explanation, which seemed to hover between metaphor and literal description, between psychological insight and supernatural revelation. “Are you saying the town was made up of… of forgotten parts of people? Like the parts of me you took?” The other Elya nodded. “Exactly like that. When I left your apartment that night, I came here, to Elsewhere. I brought with me all the parts of you that you had forgotten or rejected—your capacity for wonder, your ability to believe in the inexplicable, your willingness to embrace mystery rather than always seeking explanation and control.” “And now?” Elya asked, suddenly afraid of the answer. “Now you have a choice,” the other Elya said. “You can return to your life as it was, continue on your path of increasing control and decreasing joy. Or you can reclaim what you’ve lost, reintegrate the parts of yourself that I took with me, and leave this place whole again.” “How?” Elya asked, the question simple but encompassing worlds of uncertainty. How did one reclaim lost parts of oneself? How did one reintegrate fragments of identity that had become autonomous? “By acknowledging them,” the other Elya said. “By saying goodbye to the person you’ve been and hello to the person you might become. By recognizing that identity is not fixed but fluid, not singular but multiple, not a destination but a journey.” As she spoke, the other Elya began to shimmer slightly, her edges becoming less defined, as if she were starting to dissolve back into possibility rather than maintain a solid, specific form. Elya felt a corresponding sensation in herself, a loosening of boundaries, a softening of the shell that had contained her since the night her reflection had departed. “I don’t know how to do that,” Elya admitted, a confession that would have been unthinkable just days ago, when certainty and control had been her lodestars. The other Elya smiled, her form becoming more translucent by the moment. “You don’t need to know,” she said. “You just need to be willing to try, to step into the unknown without demanding a map, to embrace mystery rather than insist on explanation.” She held out her hand, an echo of the moment in the bathroom when the reflection had reached through the mirror, inviting Elya to cross a boundary she had been afraid to pass.
This time, Elya didn’t hesitate. She reached out and took the other Elya’s hand, feeling it solid and warm despite its translucent appearance. The moment their hands connected, something shifted—not in the world around them, but in Elya herself. A door opening somewhere deep inside, a barrier dissolving, a separation healing. The other Elya smiled one last time, her face now so transparent that Elya could see the trees behind her. “Goodbye, Elya,” she said, her voice fading like an echo. “Remember: what is forgotten isn’t gone. It’s just elsewhere, waiting to be remembered.” And then she was gone, not departed but absorbed, her essence flowing back into Elya like water returning to its source. Elya stood alone in the grove, but she no longer felt incomplete, no longer sensed the absence that had hollowed her out since the night her reflection had left. She felt, instead, a fullness, a richness of being that she had forgotten was possible. Colors seemed brighter, sounds clearer, the air itself more substantial against her skin. The world had depth and texture again, no longer muffled by the gauze of partial existence. As she left the grove and walked back to her car, Elya noticed something she had missed before: a small signpost at the point where the nameless town’s main street had been. It bore a single word, hand-painted in letters that seemed to shift and change even as she read them: “Elsewhere.” Elya smiled, understanding now what the veiled woman had meant. The town wasn’t gone; it was just elsewhere, existing in a state of possibility rather than fixed reality, a place that could be forgotten without disappearing completely, that could be remembered without becoming fully solid. Like parts of a self, set aside but never truly lost, waiting to be reclaimed and reintegrated when the time was right. She got into her car and drove back toward the highway, toward what most people would call the real world. But as she reached the exit ramp, she glanced in her rearview mirror and saw, just for a moment, the town restored—buildings and streets and people, all going about their business in that slightly off, slightly rehearsed way she had noticed the day before. Then she blinked, and it was gone again, leaving only empty fields and the lingering sensation that reality was both more solid and more permeable than she had previously believed. As she merged onto the highway, heading back toward her apartment and her life, Elya felt the parts of herself that had been restored shifting and settling, integrating with the person she had been, creating someone new—or perhaps someone old, recovered rather than discovered, remembered rather than created. She drove with the windows down, letting the wind tangle her hair, no longer concerned with maintaining the perfect appearance that had once seemed so important. In the car’s side mirror, she caught glimpses of her reflection smiling—not the secret, separate smile of the other Elya, but her own smile, genuine and unforced, the expression of someone who had found something precious that she hadn’t known was lost.