Echoes of the mind

If she hadn’t known it was raining, she might have thought small stones were being thrown at the window. The trees that once gleamed green in the summer sun now burst into erratic shades of red. Large raindrops knocked on the window; she presumed they wanted to be let in, impatient to enter, to be part of something larger than themselves. 

She sat by the windowpane, her hair impeccably styled, though no one was there to notice. The nail polish on her fingers was chipped, half-scraped off by idle worry, and the white shirt with its puffed sleeves—a sewing project she had meant to start—remained untended. These small details went unnoticed, unseen by the world. No one knew the words she murmured in her sleep, not even herself. No one shared her bed. The world was oblivious to her paintings, her writing, and the way she matched her lipstick to her shoelaces, as if her very existence was a silent, unspoken art—a performance to an empty theater. 

She imagined what it would feel like to welcome the storm beyond the glass. To run out onto the street, to throw herself flat on the ground, letting the rain peel back the layers of her restless mind. Instead, she gently touched the glass with her fingertip. She let her chipped nail trace a streak of water racing down the pane. The raindrop worked its way further and further until it finally collided with another raindrop, merged, and they continued the journey together. She found the raindrops fascinating, but she had no one but herself to share this mundane moment with.

Her moments felt so utterly her own that they suffocated her, as if her life was a room with no windows or doors. Her mind felt lonely at times—the hollow sound of her own thoughts, unshared and unanswered.

Nobody knew the dreams that had flickered behind her eyes the night before, the sentences her thoughts quietly sculpted, how those words ricocheted off the walls of her mind, sometimes tumbling dangerously close to her lips before she could catch them. Her thoughts spiraled inward, tightening around the same relentless fear: I’m the only one with this memory, and when I die, it will die with me. 

Oddly, it wasn’t the grand memories that haunted her, but the ordinary ones: the rhythm of raindrops, the colors of the leaves, the thoughts she shaped in the privacy of her mind. They felt so fragile, so personal, yet so fleeting that she could barely grasp them herself. In a week, even she would struggle to recall this moment amid countless others. Even now, as the rain softened and the streetlights began to glisten against the wet pavement, she could feel the feeling of the previous memory slipping away. 

Tomorrow, a thousand new mundane experiences would crowd into her mind. The moment of rain racing down the window would be buried beneath the mass of yesterdays. She wouldn’t remember what color of lipstick she matched her shoelaces to. It would slip through her fingers like sand, she could gather the sand, rearrange the pieces, but they would never settle in the same way again. Without realizing it, she would think about the memory for the very last time.

On her best days, when moments were so vivid and joyous that she wished they could be preserved forever, a familiar ache appeared. Each memory, no matter how joyful, inevitably fell into the bittersweet category of gut-wrenching nostalgia. They could not remain entirely sweet; they dissolved the instant they ended, stained by their impermanence. The loneliest were the memories that existed only within her, unshared and untold. Even in the midst of happiness, anxiety whispered of what was already the past. She imagined herself escaping her restless skin, crawling out of it if only just to breathe for a moment.

Outside, the wind tugged at the frail leaves that fluttered stubbornly. Unconsciously, she followed their swirling motion with her eyes, as if she, too, risked being swept away in the wild autumn weather. The water swept through the city, and the world felt reborn. Fear and anxiety were washed away, leaving only sparkling streets and cleansed souls. Yet the renewal didn’t touch her. She remained as she was, a fragile, brittle thing in a world that would forget her name.

In every window, on every street, in every building, someone was thinking thoughts she would never know, living lives she would never cross. People were constantly forming ideas that would never be spoken, sharing conversations destined to fade, creating memories that would one day vanish — all playing out in parallel to her own. When her time came, she knew everything she was—every fleeting moment, every private thought—would dissolve into time’s void, unremarked and unremembered. 

Once again, she imagined running out onto the rain-slick street, and letting the rain strip away her fears, her thoughts, her very self. Instead, she remained rooted to the spot, her fingertip pressed to the cold pane—a barrier between herself and the world. 

Sometimes, she felt as if the universe noticed her, aligning itself just for her—a private symphony composed in secret. When the song in her earbuds ended precisely as her foot touched the threshold, or the chorus swelled at the exact instant a beam of sunlight cut through the clouds, she felt inexplicably seen. These fragile alignments made her feel observed, noticed—oddly appreciated. It was as if a presence lingered at the edges of her life, content to press its fingers into the fabric of her reality only now and then, just enough to be felt. These moments made her feel invincible, as if she mattered.

The air hung sharp and brittle, laced with the scent of freshly dampened grass, as though the earth itself had been laundered clean. She listened to the growl of tires on asphalt, a low, steady percussion beneath the delicate patter of raindrops. The world inhaled again, quicker this time, yet achingly familiar, as if it, too, forgot and repeated its rhythm. The world would go on spinning. When her name faded into the void, the rain would still tap against the windows. In the vast, indifferent expanse of existence, she was less than a shadow—a speck of dust among the restless leaves, the crawling insects, the whispering trees bowing to the wind. 

But for now, she kept her hand pressed to the glass, and for a moment, it felt enough.