The following morning didn't feel like a return to normal.
Because nothing felt normal anymore.
The silence in the kitchen didn't soothe. The warmth of the dosa on his plate didn't comfort. Even Ira's voice — cheerful and teasing as she reminded him to pack his school notebook — didn't quite reach his bones.
Everything felt like a copy of a copy. Familiar, but no longer real.
Ruhan stepped outside into the morning sun, bag slung over one shoulder, eyes scanning everything. His street, the cracks in the pavement, the parked scooter in front of Sharma aunty's gate — all unchanged. But now, each detail shimmered with the suspicion of meaning. As if the world was a puzzle, and he'd only just realized it had edges.
At school, he sat through the first two classes without hearing a word. His pen didn't move. His mind replayed everything from the night before — the meeting on the abandoned platform, the names, the fragments of their stories.
Then the voice returned.
A whisper, so soft it might've been his own thought. But it wasn't.
"Not all your memories are yours."
He jerked upright, looking around. Nobody noticed.
Not even Arav.
And Arav always noticed.
But even Arav was talking to someone else today, eyes bright, hand waving animatedly — as if nothing had ever broken between them. As if the events that tore them apart were never real.
Had he changed something already? Had the timeline bent because of him?
Or was he just hallucinating it all?
He skipped lunch.
Instead, he walked to the old supply room behind the auditorium — a place no one bothered with anymore. There, he sat on a dusty bench, trying to still his thoughts.
But that was when the memory hit.
Not a flashback. Not déjà vu.
A full, vivid memory — of a life he hadn't lived.
He was ten years old. In a room with blue curtains. Crying over a girl's drawing. A drawing of a lighthouse and a bird with a ribbon in its beak.
He'd never seen that drawing.
He'd never had blue curtains.
And yet… the sadness felt familiar. Too sharp. Too deep.
He stumbled out of the room, breath ragged.
He didn't go back to class.
He walked home in a daze, hoping the world would reset with each step.
It didn't.
At night, he couldn't sleep.
He scribbled every piece of memory he had — his own, and now the borrowed ones.
The drawing.
The sound of waves.
The ribbon.
The taste of salt in the wind.
None of it belonged to his past. But somehow, they were tied to his future.
And in the corner of the page, without thinking, he wrote a name.
Astra.
Not in cursive.
Not in block letters.
But in someone else's handwriting.
Ruhan stared at it.
The letters curved gently, like sea foam.
He didn't know how he knew that.
But he knew one thing:
Somewhere out there, someone else was remembering him too.
And maybe — just maybe — time was giving them all a way back.