The Illusory Truths

Category: Echos & Shadows

  • Rodovaya Istoriya

    Rodovaya Istoriya

    My name is Simon Vautrin, and I was born in Brooklyn in October of 1975. That was the year my parents stopped running from whatever shadows haunted them on the old continent and decided America would be the place to raise kids. They arrived with so few possessions that it would shame even the most minimalist of individuals. A few suitcases, a box of old family heirlooms, and their stubborn belief that on this side of the ocean, life would be prosperous.

    By the time I was 25, I had carved out a quiet life for myself, living alone in a narrow two-story house at the northern tip of Manhattan. My days are filled with cataloging relics in a posh museum on the Upper East Side, sifting through the dust of people that the world has chosen to forget. At night, I spend time with my partner, Sam, delving into our shared love of cinema.

    Life moved in steady loops: subway rides, late-night dinners, and the occasional beer night out with Anthony, my oldest friend. But then came the package, carrying a notebook that froze me from the inside out, the way you feel just before someone delivers tragic news. Even if I didn’t know yet that the notebook had passed through the hands of a man working up high in the north tower of the World Trade Center, a man who never made it out that September morning. I also had no idea how his death would knot my name to his work, or how blood moves in patterns so tangled it sometimes takes a lifetime and a tragedy to drag them into the light.

    That package wasn’t the end of a story; it was the opening scene, the voices of my ancestor demanding that his story be heard, and the tragic demise of the man who discovered it.

    Part I – The Package

    It arrived in the months following the attacks, a small package, postage stamped with the frugality of official U.S. government mail. I was on my way to work when I found it in the mailbox, but intrigued, I went back in the house to open it.

    Inside the packaging was a black leather-bound notebook, no logo, no inscriptions. Alongside it, a single sheet on FBI letterhead:

    Letter on pseudo-official FBI letterhead. Screen reader version follows.

    My hands were trembling as I turned the notebook over, and there it was, a torn piece of paper, rough edges, my contact information scribbled on it as if it had been written in a hurry. I was in shock. I didn’t know anyone who could have been anywhere nearby the towers that day. At least, I didn’t think I did. My heart skipped a beat, and my breath was stuck in my throat, as if I already knew my life was about to take a wild turn.

    Holding this notebook, a hundred questions detonated at once in my brain. How did my name end up in Lower Manhattan? Who wrote it? Why would they have carried my address? Why hadn’t I heard about this until now?

    The questions kept stacking as my pulse climbed. I pushed back from the table, crossed the living room in a rush, and climbed the narrow attic stairs two at a time. If there was an answer, it might be buried up there, in the boxes of my family’s collection of old letters, photographs, and notebooks. Dust swirled in the beam of a single incandescent light bulb hanging off the ceiling as I began pulling lids off cardboard, looking for any paper, any note, or half-forgotten letter that could tell me who in my family had that handwriting.

    Near the bottom of a box, I found a yellowed envelope. It had non-English typical fonts and old European stamps. Inside was a letter from years ago, addressed to my maternal grandmother and signed by a relative I have heard of but never met. The handwriting was very similar to the one in the black notebook, but he is believed to have disappeared before my parents were even born. Could it really be his?

    My curiosity outpaced the time spent trying to resolve that mystery. I went back downstairs, sat down, and started reading through the notebook. It wasn’t a single story, more of a collection of thoughts, notes, and small doodles.

    Written mostly in German but with some passages in what seem to be an old Slavic language, possibly a blend of Ruthenian and Russian. It began with short appreciation stories almost like small poems from a sensitive boy who would have been born and raised during The Great War. As I continued reading, the messages became more cryptic, as if the author was afraid of persecution if these writings were to fall into the wrong hands. Some of the stories contained pieces of messages about a great forbidden friendship, or perhaps was it about an impossible love?

    Part 2 – The Motherland

    In hopes of learning more about that distant relative and potentially uncovering a family secret, I visited my parents later that day. Their house always feels like stepping into a different world, with walls lined with old photographs from their life in Eastern Europe, and the scents unique to the last century. My grandmother, Oma as I still call her, has lived with them since the early ’90s, and I was hoping they’d be able to help me piece together the fragments of a family story still begging to be written.

    I decided to wait before bringing up the notebook. The tragic events of September had already brought back traumatic memories from their past, so I didn’t want to worry them before I could learn more. I focused the conversation on one of the old letters I’d found, the one with handwriting that looked almost identical to the content of the notebook. The first step was to learn more about that distant relative and see if I could find enough information to decipher its content by myself.

    “Oma, do you remember who sent you that letter?” I asked, handing her the old letter.

    I saw a gentle smile forming on her face as she began to speak of her uncle, a talented and soft young man who used to draw pictures of tourists in the festive streets of Berlin right before the war.

    She got up slowly and reached for the photo album sitting on the corner table by the television. She sat back down and started flipping the album pages, one by one, until her hand just stopped. We were staring at an old black-and-white photo of two young men, their shoulders touching, both smiling as if the world was theirs to discover. She pointed at one and said softly: 

    “My dear, this is your great-granduncle Emil. And the man beside him was his special friend.” 

    She didn’t have to say more as I already knew what “special friend” meant for people of her generation.

    By the late nineteenth century, Berlin was a modern and progressive city, a place where artists converged, painters chasing new colors, writers chasing new words, cinematographers breaking new ground in photography, and even scientists daring to push the limits of what was possible. These were facts of the past I already knew, but today I learned something else, something darker about my own family history. 

    According to my Oma, Emil’s childhood, in the German-occupied Volhynia region, ended in a single violent moment, an explosion that tore apart his home, which killed both of his parents. My Oma was too young to remember it clearly, only fragments of the story that her parents shared with her. After the accident, my great-grandparents took Emil in to live with them; they did their best to support him as he grew up. At the age of eighteen, he moved to Berlin to study, using the inheritance he had received from his parents. My great-grandparents signed the legal papers, promising they would remain responsible for him until he turned twenty-one, the legal age in Germany at the time.

    Long after the law had declared him a man, Emil kept writing letters to my Oma, who had been like a younger sister to him. She saved every one, each page a thin thread of his life, a glimpse of someone trying to endure a secret as the sky darkened over all of Europe.  Then, in late 1939, the letters stopped coming, and the silence that followed was strong with unspoken assumptions: had he been taken, killed, or was he in hiding and unable to send mail? I asked my Oma what she thought happened to him. She looked away in the distance, then glanced at my parents, pensive, and said: 

    “I don’t know, dear. I hope he’s okay,” while she also shrugged. I can tell that those thoughts are upsetting her, so I didn’t insist.

    Learning about Emil was like finding lost pieces of a puzzle, seeing him stepping off trains, slipping through narrow streets, leaving behind footprints that have long since disappeared beneath new pavement. By that point, there wasn’t any doubt in my mind: the notebook was his and might help us better understand what happened to him. I also tried to find out if they were aware of any relatives that would also have made it to New York City, people who would be familiar with Emil’s story.

    My parents’ own beginnings were also knotted in the same restless history that had reshaped Eastern Europe between World War I and World War II. Their story felt like something out of a Shakespearean tragedy, two youths from opposing worlds, bound by fate and torn by the brutal realities of war. My mother’s family had settled in a German colony in the Odesa Province, a borderland on the Black Sea coast where Ukraine and Moldova meet. My father came from the shadow of another empire; his father was a Soviet soldier who was posted in a nearby region after the war to help keep Stalin’s grip on a land, a land divided by cultural differences so divergent that it remains to this day.

    As I was leaving their home that evening, the sky outside was a deep, blushing purple, with the city’s lights flickering in the distance. The journey ahead to learn about that notebook was uncertain; the path was clearly tangled with ghosts and half-remembered stories from a distant past. But I knew one thing for sure: the search for the truth had only just begun.

    Part 3 – The Transcription

    Back at home, I cleared my desk, set the notebook down, and put on a pair of nitrile gloves to examine it more closely. I opened to the first page and began slowly, pencil in hand, transcribing Emil’s pieces of words into American English.

    Sentences in Ruthenian like: “Вулиці тепер голосніші, ніж театри” meaning “The streets are louder than the theaters now”

    I tried to read each passage aloud, not simply translating but inhabiting his words, the same way an actor gets into the skin of his character.

    He also wrote about painting in Berlin, calling them “Schattenbilder”; this was in one of the German terms I could never fully translate, unsure how best to capture its meaning; “shadow pictures” simply feels wrong.

    Page by page, the story unfolded: the chatter of train stations, the smell of cheap beer, summer vacations on Rügen islands in the Baltic Sea, then another line stopped me, “Сьогодні я зустрів одну людину. Його звали Андреас…” (Tonight, I met someone. His name is Andreas…)

    I froze when I read that name. Andreas. A name written plainly in the early entries, written with passion, could that be the “special friend” my mother showed me in the picture? He was talking very openly about Andreas, who smiled, as if their love wasn’t forbidden. They walked together by the Spree. They spoke of traveling to Paris, Zürich, and Venice.

    And then, as the pages turned into the mid-1930s, the tone shifted. Phrases getting increasingly cryptic like this one: “Занадто багато очей. Занадто багато питань.” which translates to something like “Too many eyes. Too many questions.”

    Then I stared at a few spots where the ink on the page where Emil had wiped off some words and replaced them with “Freund” (friend). I can only imagine that the original words were probably something that made reference to a lover instead. Then passages grew less direct, slipping into metaphor, almost a secret code.

    I pulled my laptop closer, cross-referencing dates and places, every entry lined up with years when Berlin surged with rallies and broken glass, when walls truly did have ears. The abrupt tightening of Emil’s words matched the climate of the time, and I could feel the coldness of it press against my body.

    But I also sensed something else. I could feel that Emil had left these traces for someone to find, to remember their story in case something bad happened. Between some older Ruthenian phrases that I couldn’t yet translate clearly, like “Тіні… Мури мають вуха… Питання.” Emil’s life was preserved, coded for safety, but still here and waiting to be heard.

    And that’s when I got enlightened. I rushed back to the attic to find the letters, all the letters he had sent my grandmother, all the letters she felt compelled to keep all these years, not understanding why, not knowing that they were keys to decode his notebook.

    I leaned back, pencil resting between my fingers. It was at that moment that I realized the notebook was more than a relic; it was a map, an unfinished story that was still writing itself, decades later, in America.

    Was it fate that brought the notebook here? Who was that man, working only a few miles away from me? It couldn’t be a coincidence.

    Part 4 – The Film Collective

    I couldn’t shake the question. Who was that man, working just a few miles from me, who had somehow held the same notebook in his hands?

    Days bled into long, quiet nights of research. My desk became a chaos of papers, scanned fragments, and half-translated lines that were only dragging me deeper down a rabbit hole.

    That’s when I reached out to historians’ networks and reviewed online forums devoted to lost and displaced artifacts.

    Then one afternoon, a historian friend from Berlin wrote back. She had been cross-referencing the international import/export database and found mention of a shipment from the early ’90s, described as “personal manuscripts and intimate correspondence”, brought in by a small film company that had an office somewhere in lower Manhattan.

    The company’s name didn’t mean much at first, Aurora Films Collective, a small indie production firm created just a few years earlier. The importer’s name was still legible on the record: Michael Keene, associate producer, and a partially hidden address at 1 World Trade Center, 10048.

    I followed the trail, scanning every film database on the Internet, searching for the names and keywords I had collected so far. Then, a 1998 production listing for a project titled “The Border in Mind” appeared. The description read “a historical adaptation based on letters and journals recovered in post-war Europe.” That finding made my pulse rush; it had to be what I was looking for.

    That title, “The Border in Mind”, wasn’t random. I remembered similar writings from Emil’s final letters to my Oma and her family; he talked about escaping to France with his friend Andreas.

    So that was it, that person by the name of Keene had been trying to rebuild and tell Emil’s story. He and his team had been searching for living relatives, someone who could help them authenticate and correctly translate the notebook.

    And somehow, they had found us.

    I thought of my mother in Brooklyn, still keeping in touch with the few relatives left in Europe. She had shared my address with them a few years ago when my Oma immigrated here, thinking it would be more reliable than theirs since I was in sort of the family historian and archivist. Maybe that’s how Keene’s team was able to trace it back to me. Maybe that’s how my address ended up tucked inside that metal box that was found among the wreckage in the aftermath of 9/11.

    Keene must have meant to reach out, but he never got the chance before that unfortunate event. I sat there for a long time, listening to the hum of the city through my attic’s tiny window. It all felt too strange, too aligned, as if the universe itself had been conspiring to hand the story back to me.

    Before shutting down my computer that night, I saw a note in the archived production file with another address in Los Angeles, along with a few different names and a phone number. I wrote all of that down carefully, and tomorrow morning, I’ll call them.

    Part 5 – The Call

    The city outside is already awake, with delivery trucks growling down Amsterdam Avenue. I barely slept, but I got up and brewed a strong pot of coffee and sat at my desk. The notebooks sitting on the edge of it with my notes and documents all over. The Los Angeles number at the bottom of a printed page, looking at me, waiting to be dialed.

    It was six in the morning here, which meant only three over there, still in the middle of the night, so I decided to wait before calling. But it was okay. I spent those hours confirming the names, cross-checking the addresses online, and imagining who might pick up when I finally dialed the number.

    When the clock eventually reached eleven here, I took a long breath and pressed the call button.

    The line rang a couple of times before a woman’s voice answered, bright but exhausted, like someone who’s juggling a dozen tasks at once. “Good morning, Aurora Productions,” she said.

    I hesitated briefly before saying, “Hi, good morning. My name is Simon Vautrin. I’m calling from New York. I found your number in one of your old project files, something labeled ‘The Border in Mind’. I was hoping to speak to someone who might know more about it.”

    There was a pause on the other end followed by a quiet shuffle of papers. “Ehh..The Border in Mind, that’s an old one,” she said. Then I could hear muffled voices in the background, “Give me a second.” she added almost with a sense of panic, then the sound of a phone being transferred quickly.

    A man picked up the line, his tone was slower, “This is David, you asked about The Border in Mind?”

    “Yes! I came across references to a film that was in pre-production around 1998? I believe some of the material used came from a recovered notebook?”

    Another silence, longer this time, as if I had touched on a sensitive subject. “We had a team in New York researching the story, which was apparently a personal diary or maybe some wartime correspondence. The idea was to adapt it into a feature about exile and remembrance. Then…” at this point his voice trailed off and he added “Then everything stopped after September.”

    I asked with a confident tone, “So it was real?”

    “Yes,” he responded, “The New York office was working on tracing any living relatives connected to the notebook’s owner. I think they had a lead before… well, you know…before the tragedy.”

    He then cleared his throat quietly, “To be honest, sir, no one here ever knew what became of the materials. They were supposed to be sent back here, but after the attacks, most of the production files disappeared, and the project was shelved.”

    I looked at the papers spread across my desk, the address, the names, the fragments of translation I had already covered, and felt the weight of it all settle in before responding.

     “I have the notebook,” I responded almost timidly before adding, “The author was my great grand-uncle and very close to my mother’s family, and I’d be interested in working with you to restart that project.”

    David replied, suggesting a meeting in Los Angeles the following week to discuss the project further. This wasn’t part of my plans, but I instinctively said yes, without even thinking about it. I knew both Sam and I had a lot of accumulated vacation time, so perhaps we could take a little vacation and enjoy the California sunshine while we’re there. As soon as I was done with the call, I contacted my favorite travel agent and asked him to book me a flight and hotel to Los Angeles. We’ll leave this weekend and come back the following.

    Part 6 – The Meeting

    By the time our plane touched down, I felt as though I had crossed not just the country, but the threshold to another world. Sam was sitting beside me, smiling, quietly amused by my excitement. The first thing that hit me about LA wasn’t the sunset, although it does look like that endless golden sky you see in movies; it was its scent. It smelled like a mix of ocean air, sunscreen, dust, and the scent of palm trees. A clash of wealth where the rich and powerful in Beverly Hills neighbor the poorest of them all in Skid Row, sharing their lives within a single county.

    Aurora Productions sat behind a sun-bleached café, next to a souvenir shop that sold sunscreen, cheap magnets, and overpriced water bottles. The edifice itself looked old, definitely from a distant past, with Art Deco elements preserved perfectly, as if time had never passed. Out front, a sign still read “AURORA FILMS COLLECTIVE.” It leaned forward a little, like the screws had started to loosen and no one cared to fix it anymore.

    After entering the lobby, movie posters from wall to wall covered the hallway. Half faded, half forgotten. The kind of movies that never made it past the festival circuit. A tall man stepped out of an office. Early forties, maybe. He had the tired look of someone who’d been waiting too long for something real.

    “Simon Vautrin,” he said, shaking my hand as if testing its weight. “David,” I replied. “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me.”

    He led us down the corridor, through a door marked ARCHIVES, shelves covering the walls all the way up to the ceiling, filled with stacks of boxes. He gestured us toward a table, “This is what survived.” he said. 

    I reached into the nearest box and lifted a folder, when I opened it, the first page stopped me:

    THE BORDER IN MIND
    Based on the recovered journals of Emil Berek.

    In that moment, it felt like my blood ran cold through my veins. You know that strange rush when your brain can’t catch up to what your eyes are seeing. The feeling of realizing that someone had already tried to tell his story. OUR story. Before I even knew anything about it.

    Then David looked at me and said, “We had plans to turn that story into a film back in the nineties. The New York team did most of the research, and we received partial translations of the notebook. But everything ended when Michael Ke…”  He stopped mid-sentence, choking on the words as if he was about to cry. But he didn’t have to explain more; I already knew what he meant.

    He opened a folder that was filled with documents like Polaroids of set mock-ups, a library, a Berlin street, estimates for sound stage rental, and told me, “This was all Keene’s doing; he was obsessed with the story; he was calling it ‘the love that outlived empires.’”

    “We’ve dreamed of finishing it over the next few years, but after the tragedy, the rights got tangled, investors disappeared, and people moved on,” he added with a tone of despair. 

    I placed Emil’s real notebook on the table beside the draft script. For a few seconds, it felt like the book was waiting to be there, at that specific moment in time, almost like a cosmic attraction or divine intervention.

    David touched the cover with some hesitation and said, “Would you… Um…Would you let us read it?” That meant leaving it with them, so I hesitated for a few seconds, then nodded. “If it means bringing his story back, yes.” But there was one condition: I wanted to be involved in the project.

    That night, Sam and I walked the length of Santa Monica Pier. The sea was dark and calm, full of the kind of quietude that happens only once in a lifetime. I told him that for the first time, I didn’t feel like a spectator to my own family’s history. He smiled, squeezed my hand, and said, “Then maybe this is what was meant to be, your grand-uncle guiding you to make sure his forbidden love story carried on.”

    I didn’t answer; we stood there for a little longer, quietly listening to the waves hit against the pier, the kind of silence that says more than words ever could.

    Part 7 – The Making of a Film

    The following months felt like one scene blurring into the next, from New York to Los Angeles, winter transitioning to spring. Initially, my job with the production was relatively straightforward. I was there to ensure the story remained authentic, to verify the handwriting and tone. I helped with the translations, and I had carefully studied the letters between my mother’s family and my great-uncle, which greatly helped interpret the context and decrypt the smallest emotional details. Would he have used that word? What might he have felt there? I was becoming so close to Emil. It’s like I wasn’t just a descendant anymore, but I was part of his life.

    Mira Kline, the director, had a way of seeing things that made me feel a tiny bit uneasy. She wasn’t giving instructions; she gave “visions”.

    “Think of this as bringing something back to life through details,” she told the crew one morning. She added that a story’s truth wasn’t in how accurate it was, but in its atmosphere, the little things between the lines.

    The historian in me seriously wanted to scream insults at her for saying things like that. But deep down, I knew that she was right. If I wanted that story to reach as many people as possible, it had to have that pizzazz only Hollywood can give us. So, I decided to follow her lead while staying on my toes to ensure we wouldn’t stray too far from the truth. 

    We started filming in Germany. The movie was going to be focusing on Emil’s life as an adult, trying to survive as a young gay man in Nazi Germany. The air was fresh and crisp, and I tried to imagine what life was like for him. I often stood behind Mira, watching the actors through the monitor. The actor playing Emil was a quiet German man with a light Slavic accent, with a narrow build and the same uncertain smile I’d seen in old photos. The actor playing Andreas had a different kind of composure, one that stood up to the world, ready to fight. Together, they moved through the frame like two people afraid that light might expose what the war had tried to erase.

    There was a scene depicting their attempt to escape the night before their capture near the border with France, which was shot inside a small mountain cottage built for the production. The crew cleared out, but Mira asked me to stay on the set.

    The actor playing Emil sat at a desk, writing the final words of the journal. Outside, snow gathered on the window ledge. He whispered the line I already knew by heart: 

    “The sky is clear but the danger still near, tomorrow the rails will go somewhere the shadows can’t follow.”

    As soon as she yelled, “It’s a wrap,” I felt something change in me, like a little spark of wonder lighting up. I had to step outside into the cold night, with the impressive mountain peaks dominating the landscape under the moonlight. For a quick second, I noticed two male figures walking by the fence. One stopped, while the other waved at me; then, just like that, they were gone, as if the wind had blown them away. 

    I’ve been trying really hard to convince myself it was just my imagination playing tricks on me, the emotional exhaustion of that project wrapping up, but in that moment, I secretly wanted to believe, believe that ghosts really do exist. 

    As soon as we returned to Los Angeles, editing had already started. Long weeks into the post-production studios, with the same repetitions daily: sound design, color grading, CGI effects, paste, add, one more test screening, cutting, and removing what didn’t quite fit.

    I followed Mira for most of that work, whispering quiet corrections that probably mattered only to me. Sometimes she’d pause mid-scene and ask, “What do you think he meant here?” And I’d answer, not as a scholar, but as someone who had shared his blood and also the secret that he was forced to hide from his whole life.

    Once the final cut was locked, the film no longer felt like my story or theirs. It had transformed into something different, an epic tale about love and the struggle to preserve it in a world that had turned against them, despite the promises of creating a better future for all.

    Sometimes I wonder if that’s all any of us are, just echoes moving through time, trying to remember what it is that makes us human.

    Part 8 — The Premiere

    The premiere took place a few days before the Armistice on a cold November evening, as cold as it can be for southern California. People were gathering around the entrance, and the lights from the Egyptian were shining brightly on Hollywood Boulevard.

    My name was on the poster, printed in characters small enough that you’d only find it if you went looking for it, but it was there and it made me feel good. Just before we stepped onto the red carpet, Sam straightened my tie again; he’d already done it a few times earlier in the evening. It was his way of coping with anxiety, so I was fine with it.

    Inside, the lobby felt a little crowded, not unbearable, just loud and stressful to someone like me, used to the quietude of the museum basement. You could hear glassware clinking, people nearly screaming, trying to hold conversations over all the noise. A passing camera flash caught the side of a poster, and for a second, I had almost forgotten where I was.

    When the lobby lights dimmed, the room suddenly got quieter. Sam rested his hand over mine, like telling me that everything was going to be great, without speaking a word. For real, that was our thing; we were both passionate about cinema. But I would have never in a million years been able to imagine one day being in Hollywood for the premiere of a movie about my ancestor, a movie I contributed to making.

    We took our seats in the theater; the screen opened with a peaceful river shore in a suburban area west of Berlin. Two young men, laughing together and enjoying a quiet summer day in the late 1920s, falling in love, it was clear for those who understood what forbidden love is, but it wasn’t as obvious for everyone else who was watching. 

    A couple of scenes and years passed, and we are now in the early 1930s, at a tram depot in Berlin. The tracks shone faintly under the bright moonlight, cleaner and more cinematic than anything Emil ever described, but the shape of it was right. Two young men, shoulders almost touching, standing beside an idle tram car.

    The actor playing Emil laughed more easily than the real one ever would have, although I would never know for sure. The actor playing Andreas leaned in with that defiant steadiness I’d seen in the old photograph. They passed a cigarette back and forth, without exchanging a single word, as the camera lingered on the gap between their hands, on the little hesitations, on all the fragile things no one dared write plainly back then.

    Hollywood has that gift of stretching a single sentence into several minutes, but beneath the lighting and the string music, I could still feel the raw truth of the original line pulsing underneath.

    About two-thirds into the movie, we got to the rooftop scene. Mira had turned it into something nearly romantic, with a navy sky washed with clouds, the city below lit like a jewelry box. They sat near a ledge that looked suspiciously safe, especially for that era, but it felt beyond real to anyone unaware of the real story. Wind machines nudged their hair just enough to suggest danger without threatening anyone’s health.

    In Emil’s notebook, it wasn’t romantic, at least not in the way we see romance nowadays. It was fear pressed into paper, a sketch of chimneys, a crooked row of roofs, and three words scribbled tight in the margin: “Zu viel Stille” —Too much silence.

    But the movie couldn’t resist. On-screen, the actors watched the street below with the stillness of prey that knows it’s being observed. A man lingered across the road, his face hidden in shadow. The camera cut away before we could see more. That was pure invention, but I knew exactly where it came from. Emil had written once about a man who stood outside his building for too long, staring upwards.

    Then came their escape plans and the train station, the one where they attempted to catch a train to France. Emil had written about it the night before from the mountain cottage, unaware that they would get arrested before getting on that train and that it would be the last time they would ever see each other.

    From that point, the film was only a figment of what Emil left behind. Everything is pure fiction, an ending the filmmakers created where the pages stopped, a view imagined around the edges of a world that felt closer than reality itself.

    That final scene made the whole theater seem smaller. The set was gorgeous and grandiose, with clean lines, polished stone, and extras moving in a choreographed pace. The actors stood in the posture we imagined they would have at that time — backs straight, hands in their pockets so no one would notice they were shaking.

    The station scene widened, luggage rolling, train steam lifting into the lights. Someone had clearly spent weeks perfecting the perfect geometry of the set; it looked too beautiful to be real, but that felt right; it was making it easier to see the emotion. Hollywood tends to prettify the past when the real thing is too rough to touch.

    Even in the fiction, there were echoes of things Emil never said but must have felt at that time: a soldier’s gaze sweeping the line, the clacking of boots on the wooden platform, the heaviness of the unknown.

    Then the moment arrived.

    The arrest.

    On-screen, the scene unfolded with much elegance — two officers stepping out of the crowd, a small shift in the crowd’s movement, a gloved hand on Andreas’s shoulder, another man appearing behind Emil as if conjured from thin air. No guns drawn. No shouting. Just a feeling of total impuissance, facing the truth to come.

    The camera held on their faces, not long enough to become indulgent, but long enough to make the audience feel the rupture. Emil turning his head for only a second, teary eyes, looking behind him, as if he was taking one last look.

    Then a brutal cut, straight to black.

    That was the end of their story. At least the end of the story this film wanted to tell. The credits began quietly; for several seconds, the audience didn’t move. Then a few hands clapped. Followed by a few more, slow and steady. Then everyone got up from their seats, clapping and looking at the crew with adoration.

    Being part of that crew, I felt something settle in me, something soft and unfamiliar. Not pride, but maybe more like recognition. A thread tying itself back together.

    People approached me afterwards, asking variations of the same question:

    “How accurate was it? Which parts were real?”

    I kept my answers simple.

    “All of it, in one way or another.”

    It was the only truth that they needed to hear.

    Outside the theater, Hollywood was moving at its regular pace, with cars idling, neon lights humming, tourists drifting around the boulevard. David found me under the marquee and slipped an envelope into my hand. Inside was a production still: Emil’s journal on a desk, open to the last page, with a beam of light angled across it like a question waiting to be answered.

    “Thank you,” I said with a lump in my throat, as I was about to cry from the continued overwhelming emotions I had felt that evening. He simply shook his head and returned to the after-party.

    My parents had flown in from New York with my Oma, and seeing them standing in front of the Egyptian, all dressed up like movie stars, felt surreal. 

    We had gotten Oma a fancy Saint Laurent evening bag; she looked like the queen of England the way she was holding it proudly. During the screening, I’d looked over a few times, catching the play of light on her face — pride, disbelief, and something deeper, something that lived far older than any of us.

    Outside, under the buzzing marquee, she took my hand and whispered “I never thought I’d hear his voice again,” she meant her uncle Emil, of course. The same uncle whose handwriting she remembered instantly the day I first brought back the old letter.

    My father stood beside us, quieter than usual. He carried emotion like a man carrying expensive porcelain — close, careful, unsure what to do with it.

    We walked together for a bit before they headed back to their hotel. Afterward, Sam and I drifted down the boulevard, passing storefront windows that featured all types of movie-themed goods. Somewhere in the distance, the sound of a saxophone blended with the voices of the street vendors.

    Then, for just a second, in the reflection of a souvenir shop window, I caught sight of two faint shapes behind us. They looked just like the ones I remember seeing on set at the mountain cottage.

    A greeting, a farewell, or my pure imagination, I couldn’t tell, but the feeling stayed — a soft presence, not haunting, just… nearby. Like something unfinished leaning towards the living.

    Because stories don’t end.

    They wait.

    And tonight, they finally had their chance to speak.

    — FIN —

    Author’s Reflection: This story grew from the idea that families pass down more than names and dates, we inherit echoes, half-buried emotions, and the silence around the things no one wanted to explain. Simon’s journey let me explore how a life can be shaped by someone he never met, and how the past keeps breathing beneath the surface whether we acknowledge it or not. I’ve always been fascinated by the stories older relatives never fully told, the way a single lost thread can tug at an entire lineage. Rodovaya Istoriya became my way of tracing those hidden connections and honoring the quiet, often painful histories that still shape us today.

  • The Locket

    The Locket

    Prologue

    Berlin, 1933.

    The signs were everywhere, but in their vulnerability, the people of Germany chose to believe promises of safety and order. They were told that authorities would remove criminals and undesirable elements from the streets—that law and discipline would return, and that honest citizens would finally prosper again. For a moment, it felt true, at least until the laws started to change.

    Quiet and precise edits to the legal code redefined who counted as a criminal. People who had done nothing wrong were suddenly labeled as enemies of the state. Quietly, the definitions shifted, and anyone who spoke too loudly, looked too long, or loved the wrong person was now potentially committing a crime. Neighbors disappeared in the night; they had done nothing wrong, but no longer fit the new definition of what was right.

    From my apartment window, I watched the sun rise over Schöneberg that morning, illuminating the violence of the previous night’s raids—broken glass catching the morning light outside the Jewish bakery just down the street from me. New posters were displayed over the brick wall, still wet with glue, promising a new dawn of prosperity while blaming homosexuals, Jews, and other minorities for the pain the country experienced. Each day, the call for a purified nation grew louder, and agreeing with it became a question of survival.

    I kept a small locket, pressed against my chest, hidden from view. Inside was a photograph—two young men smiling at each other, unafraid, taken at a time when such affection was not scrutinized by the authorities. When the police trucks rattled down the avenue, I pressed myself into the shadows, my heart beating against the locket, against the forbidden love it protected. I knew what happened to men like me; the lucky ones ended up in camps, wearing coarse blue and gray striped uniforms with pink triangles stitched over their hearts; the rest were shot in the streets, like vermin.

    I kept walking, knowing that beneath the city’s rubble of national pride and lies, unconditional love still lived in hidden places—fragile, hunted, but alive.

    Part I – The Purge

    At first, it may have been easy to believe the raids were just a reaction, but soon they became too frequent and too focused. You’d hear about someone vanishing—then it would happen again two streets over. Then again. A teacher was just gone one day. A shop closed without warning. The man who lived above me stopped opening his curtains, and no one asked why.

    People stuck to safe words—weather talk, neighborly nods, praise for the Chancellor spoken just loud enough to be overheard. We learned not to say anything that mattered—just enough breath to pass through the day without notice.

    The newspapers spoke of traitors removed from within, Röhm, Schleicher, and many SA leaders. Names printed in bold beside phrases like “cleansing” and “national renewal.” They called it a necessary correction — the purging of threats to order. But the message underneath was clearer than the ink: no one is untouchable.

    I remembered hearing Röhm’s name whispered in corners of the city—always low, always careful. He wasn’t just a soldier or a party official. His private life mirrored mine in ways no one ever dared speak out loud, maybe that’s why they made an example of him. He climbed too high, trusted too long—and now he’s gone, and with it any hope for people like us under these new moral rules that kept piling up.

    One morning, I found a paper slipped beneath my door. Not a notice. Not even a warning. Just a list. Paragraph 175 printed at the top in bold, and below it, language that felt more surgical than legal—phrases like unnatural acts, corrupting influence, and protecting youth. There were no names on the paper, but the weight of what it implied was enough. It didn’t need to accuse directly — only to suggest that someone was watching, and someone had been seen. I folded it carefully, but my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

    I never saw it coming, to be honest, not because the signs weren’t there – they were. Scribbled in chalk on the side of the butcher’s wall, shouted from loudspeakers at parades, slipped into the mouths of neighbours with a nervous laugh and a glance over the shoulder. But back then, I thought it couldn’t really reach me. I was careful and polite, always blending into the background. I had even learned to laugh at the right jokes, surely that had to count for something.

    Part II – Between the Lines 

    I lived on the third floor of an old building just off Nollendorfstraße, where the windows rattled in winter and the street below never fully slept. My landlord, Fraü Engel, was a widower with a perpetually closed-off expression. She had a dog that hated everyone except me; for some reason, the dog liked me.

    I worked at a bookstore—not a famous one, not the kind that secretly carried American novels, but a small shop that sold children’s books, church calendars, and memoirs about the Ottoman-German alliance that no one read anymore. It was modest, but honest work, I always enjoyed the quietude of a bookstore, it felt safe—at least, it used to be. Then, one morning, the display window changed; instead of fairy tales and hiking guides, the owner—a nervous man who smoked more than he spoke—filled it with government-printed pamphlets in sharp fonts, with words like “decency” and “cleansing” stamped over pictures of smiling Aryan families.

    A new section appeared in the back, lined with red leather volumes I’d never seen before. I remained quiet, kept my head down, and dusted shelves already clean to discreetly take a closer look at these books. They were written by so-called doctors who claimed to know how to ‘correct’ those who didn’t fit the traditional sense of family. 

    I met Emil at the old tram depot that night—our usual place, tucked behind idle cars and a wall of dirty brick. He had a bottle of schnapps and a  cigarette he claimed was French. 

    We sat on a cold slab of concrete at the end of the row, knees nearly touching. Now and then, our shoulders brushed—quiet, accidental—and neither of us said a word. Emil took a long drag, staring down the empty tracks. “Did you hear about Daniel?” he asked quietly, as if he wasn’t sure he should even mention it.

    I nodded steadily, though I wasn’t sure what to say. I noticed Daniel had been missing; his apartment had been dark for two nights. The doorman said that two men came just past midnight, not in uniform but dressed as if they wanted to be mistaken for authority. They wore long black coats, the kind that moved like shadows, and heavy boots that echoed like thunder up the stairwell. They gave no names, no explanation, just one knock at the door, followed by silence. I heard there was no shouting and no signs of struggle. Only absence, swift and quiet, like the sound had been swallowed before it ever reached the walls.

    As I was still trying to digest all of this, Emil spoke again: “They say it was his sister.” he said quietly. “She turned him in.” 

    I didn’t reply. We both understood how fast things moved now: one name spoken to the wrong person, that’s all it took.

    We sat in silence after that, the kind that stretches long and hollow, without exchanging any words; we both knew what was coming. I don’t know how much time passed; somewhere in the distance a bottle shattered, a dog barked, the city coughed and turned over in its sleep, it was time for me to leave.

    Later, back in my apartment, I slipped the locket from around my neck to hide it in the crack beneath the floorboards under the bed, as I have for the past few months, in case the authorities were to come by in the middle of the night. Like a prayer before going to sleep, I held the locket in my palm for a moment, our faces in the photo looked back at me from that summer by the river – both of us barefoot in the grass, sun-drunk and stupid with love. I miss that life, I really do.

    It felt like a different life, a version of us untouched by the harsh reality of this new Germany. Some nights, when the city was quiet enough, I could almost hear his laugh, the way he used to say my name, as if it belonged to him.  But that warmth was gone now, forced into shadows by a world that gave us no voice, no rights.

    My home, my world, had always felt fragile, like glass that could shatter at any moment, with tensions simmering long before I was born. I was beginning to see the cracks spreading through everything, like lines of gun powder that only missed a spark to ignite the end of times. But never in a million years could I have imagined that my darkest fears were about to become reality.

    Part III – Shadows in the Daylight

    The next morning, the city felt colder—like it had given up on us. I walked to work my collar turned up and my hands buried deep in my coat pockets, moving through the fog as if I was trying to disappear.

    When I arrived at the bookstore, the display window had changed again. The fairy tales had vanished, replaced by a new arrangement—titles like The Degenerate Mind, and a fresh pamphlet on social hygiene. Its cover showed two silhouettes side by side: one straight, one bent. There was no subtlety in the message, yet I made myself look past it, pretending indifference. I’m not sure what hurt more—the public indictment of people like me, or the way I’ve allowed myself to ignore it as if I were wrong.

    As I stepped inside the store, the air smelled of old paper and burned coffee – the same as every other day, I suppose, but somehow today felt different. Herr Rausch, the owner, was sitting behind the counter pretending to read, but I could feel him gazing in my direction, without saying anything. He was never much of a talker, but that time he didn’t say one word, not even a short ‘Morgen’ as he often mumbled.

    I kept to myself, quiet, gently dusting the shelves with more care than usual. My thoughts slipped loose, wandering to darker spaces—what-ifs, and worst-case endings. Suddenly, a man stepped inside, paramilitary uniform, brown shirt, polished black boots, a red armband, the swastika stark and undeniable. He didn’t look around—just walked straight to the back. He passed Goethe, past poetry, and didn’t pause until he reached the new propaganda volumes. Selected one, looking at it with almost religious admiration, as if the book contained holy power or wisdom.

    He turned, slowly, cradling the book like something sacred. On his way out, his eyes caught mine. No words passed between us, but the look was deliberate. Cold. Like a verdict already passed. I gave a nod—automatic, meaningless—the kind you give when survival depends on not being noticed.

    The door closed behind him. Only then did Herr Rausch exhale, a long, trembling breath he must have been holding the entire time.

    By the time I made it home, the sky had thinned into a dark blue shade, signaling the darkness of the night fast approaching. Emil stood near the entrance to my building, not exactly waiting—just existing in the open air like someone who didn’t want to be indoors.

    “I needed to see someone,” he said. I nodded as I unlocked the door.

    In the apartment, we moved in silence. I boiled water, the kettle’s hiss filling the space between us. He settled on the windowsill, his legs pulled up to his chest, his eyes scanning the street below as if something might arrive.

    As we sat in silence, time seemed to stretch indefinitely, until Emil finally broke the stillness with a question that had been lingering in both our minds:

    “Do you ever wonder,” Emil asked, still looking outside, “how many people know about us? I mean—really know?”

    I didn’t answer right away. That question lived in me more than he knew. I stirred sugar into his tea instead, listening to the clink of the spoon.

    He turned to face me. “If something happens… would you come looking?” I met his gaze and said “Of course I would.”

    But something in the air changed then. A silence deeper than comfort settled between us. And though neither of us said it, we both felt it: the kind of silence that only arrives when you’re not sure if you’re telling the truth.

    Part IV – My Brother

    The past few months felt as if they had been frozen in time, as if the world had dried up overnight. I didn’t need to go to work this morning, but I got up early, by habitude. I boiled water and made tea; the radio stayed off. Outside, someone shouted, and then nothing; there was absolute silence.

    I went downstairs to sort through the mail on the hallway table, not expecting anything; most days, it was just bills, announcements, or propaganda. But today, there was something else, an envelope with no stamp—just my name, written neatly in black ink.

    Back upstairs, I sat with it for a while before opening it. Long enough for the tea to go cold. Inside were two things: a photograph and a folded sheet of paper.

    The photo was old —taken in the garden behind my parents’ house. My older brother, Matthias, stood with his arm around a woman I only met once. I couldn’t recall her name, but I remembered how she laughed —bold, like she didn’t care who heard. Italian, I remembered. Her name escaped me, but not the warmth of it, it was the way she rolled her r’s when she spoke. They looked young in the picture. Hopeful. Like the war would never come.

    The note was short. 

    We’ve left Berlin. Heading south, then west. There’s talk of work in Marseille, and people say it’s quieter there. Safer. We’ll marry as soon as we arrive.

    Take care of yourself. I mean it. 

    —M.

    I read it three times as if I didn’t understand what it said. It wasn’t dated, but I guessed it had been written weeks ago. Maybe longer. He’s likely in France at this point.

    I held the photo for a while, running my thumb over its grain. A life already peeling away from mine. A thread breaking quietly in another direction. For a moment, I imagined their child growing up by the sea, speaking multiple languages, never knowing what it was like to flinch at every knock on the door. That thought didn’t make me feel better exactly, but it kept the quiet from swallowing me whole.

    Part V – The Roofline

    As I made my way downstairs, it smelled very unpleasant like boiled cabbage or maybe dusty and damp wallpaper. No one said a word as I passed by, but I could hear a radio softly playing behind a door that slammed shut the moment I got close. The neighbor across the hallway also closed her door a bit quicker than usual.

    Outside, the air had a strange heaviness to it. Like something was waiting. I walked to Emil’s building. It’s been a while since I last saw him, and I wanted to make sure he was ok. 

    I climbed the back stairwell, the one they never bothered to lock, and slipped onto the roof. From up there, the city didn’t feel safer—just quiet in the way things are before they break. Smoke drifted sideways from a dozen chimneys, and stiff bedsheets twitched on frozen clotheslines like they were trying to fly away.

    Somewhere farther off, noise bled into the stillness—boots striking pavement, a crowd shouting in a rhythm too steady to be joy. I couldn’t make out the words, just the sharp edge of them. Then came the sirens, cutting through it all. I was too young in 1914 to remember what triggered the start of The Great War, but as I soaked in the atmosphere that day, it felt like everything was about to burst.

    I pulled my coat tighter and stayed on the ledge a little longer, even as the wind picked up. I let the wind sting my cheeks, as if that could keep me grounded. I don’t know how long I was up there before I heard the door creak behind me. I wasn’t keeping time. The city stretched beneath me, grey and quiet, and I stayed still enough to almost forget what I was waiting for—until I heard the door behind me shift on its hinges.

    The sound pulled me upright. My heart skipped a beat. It was Emil. He stepped out slowly, hands half-raised in apology, his voice soft as he said “it’s just me. I nodded, not really looking at him, just staring past the rooftops and letting my breath settle, slow. Emil sat down beside me again, but this time he left a little space between us.

    He spoke quietly, like he wasn’t sure if he should be saying it out loud at all — something about a raid near Alexanderplatz. A bookshop got torn apart. No warning. They took the owner. They said he was spreading ideas they didn’t like.

    Those words—impure ideas—I’d heard them before. Now they stick to everything, like the stench of smoke in a room long emptied. You never knew what might count against you anymore. A book left open. A glance held too long. Even silence, if it came at the wrong moment.

    I stayed quiet, eyes fixed on the skyline, hoping he wouldn’t say the name of the shop I was thinking about. I didn’t want to ask if it was the shop with the poetry shelf. I didn’t want to know.

    There was a long pause. I heard someone scream far off—a short, choked sound that faded fast. “I got a letter,” I said eventually. “From Matthias.” Emil turned slightly. “Good news?” he asked.  “They made it out. Heading to France.” I said. He simply nodded, eyes glued on the horizon.

    We sat in it—not hope, not quite, but a brief pause in the descent. Then he said, “There was a man outside your building earlier. He didn’t come in. He just stood across the street for a long time. Watching.”

    My body went still. Emil added, “Could’ve been nothing. He might’ve been waiting for someone. But he looked like he knew where he was.” He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t need to.

    When I asked what would happen if someone turned us in, he didn’t answer. He only looked away — out the window, across rooftops blackened by coal smoke and early snow — and said, almost to himself, that someone would, eventually, it was just a matter of time.

    Part VI – Border in the Mind

    We knew we should have left a long time ago, but we were still there. The weeks bled together, and then one day in September came the sound of invasion. Poland. The word came like a fracture, splitting time neatly in two. There was no more room for maybes.

    It was Emil who first said it out loud — the thing we’d both been avoiding for weeks. The walls seemed to shift as he moved, slow and uneasy, like the whole room had started to sway, his shadows on the wall coming to life, with his jittering across the floor like they knew something we didn’t. He told me, “We have to go” and took a deep breath, and added, “To France, Marseille… and find your brother.” His tone was calm, almost too calm, but I could hear something thin and frayed underneath it.

    We’d waited too long already. The city was tightening around us. Getting smaller. Meaner. Like it had teeth.

    I didn’t answer right away. I was staring at the flicker of flames behind the stove grate. The idea had lived in the back of my mind for weeks, growing quieter as the world outside grew louder. But now that it was spoken, it became something else — a decision waiting for breath.

    The café near the station had been raided the week before. The place had been a refuge once — mismatched chairs, a dusty piano, boys who laughed too freely in the back corner. The owner was gone now, and so was the violinist. No one knew what happened to the two students who used to sit by the window each morning, sharing a single cup of coffee. The signboard lay in the gutter, its chalked message partially washed away by rain, still reading: Closed until further notice. I hadn’t walked that way since, it was clear—no one was coming back.

    News spread fast in whispers now, with the new declarations people were being asked to sign — not just work papers, but also questions about who they saw, where they spent time, and who they lived with. Those who hesitated too long often didn’t come back.

    It was decided. We had to go. The heat in the room was slowly giving way to the cold draft from the windows. I told him I couldn’t take the locket with me; the risk of traveling with it was too high. I said, “I have to send it to Matthias.” I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving it behind.

    He didn’t argue, only nodded, and told me he knew someone at the train station. A girl who moved post bags between carts. She owed him a favor.

    We met her after dusk, near the edge of the depot. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen. Her eyes didn’t stay in one place for long. I handed her the envelope without a word. The locket was wrapped in a scrap of soft paper, tucked beside a folded note. No return address. Just my brother’s name, a city, a message asking him to keep it safe for me, and a few bills slipped behind it like an afterthought.

    She looked down at it, then met my eyes. Her expression didn’t change. Just a slight nod — barely there — and then she turned and disappeared between the carts. Then she was gone, just like that.

    The morning we were meant to leave, the city felt too clean; a fine rain slicked the streets, mist curling through the air, making everything shimmer, as if it had been polished for someone else’s story. The bakery windows were wiped clear, as if the city wanted to present itself properly for what was about to happen.

    We carried only what we could abandon. One bag each. Our names rewritten in fresh ink, with borrowed documents and memorized lies. Emil wore a coat that didn’t fit. I kept touching my chest, instinctively checking for the locket, though it was already gone — wrapped and mailed to a girl with steady hands and no reason to ask questions.

    At the station, the Gestapo men were everywhere. We tried not to stutter, we nodded at the right moments, and we stepped into line.

    But they were watching. And they already knew.

    The arrest was quiet. No shouting, no accusations. Just a gloved hand on Emil’s shoulder, and another man holding mine. We were separated that afternoon; they didn’t give reasons, they didn’t need to.

    What came after was not something I often speak about — even now. The transport trains. The long lines. The numbers. There are things a person learns in that silence that can’t be taught, only endured. Days blurred. Names disappeared. The world became routine hunger, cold metal, and the constant erosion of what used to be called “self.”

    Part VII – Liberation Day

    They came in the spring of 1945— soldiers, not wearing the same uniforms, not shouting in German. I didn’t believe it at first; none of us did. We stayed motionless, blinking at the sun, waiting for the trick, for the shots, but none came—just voices calling out in strange accents, offering bread, blankets, water.

    They asked us for our names.

    I didn’t remember mine right away; it took a moment, but then it came back to me, “Andreas,” yes, my name is “Andreas.”I whispered it like a prayer. I weighed only forty kilos and could barely walk. My eyes had sunk so deep into my face that I didn’t recognize myself in the window of the truck that took us out. It was a miracle that I was still breathing.

    A few hours later, they transferred to a nearby station, where I was given broth, a bath, and new clothes. After a few days, I had regained sufficient strength to be moved again, this time to the Hannover camp for displaced persons in the British-controlled zone. I filled out some papers, reclaiming my identity, and listed my brother, Mathias, as a family member who might still be alive. I later asked around for Emil, quietly, but his name wasn’t on any list, at least not within our zone.

    A week or two passed; time was still slippery, so I couldn’t tell you with precision how long it was. I slept most days and strolled around most nights, pacing the gravel paths like I expected answers to be waiting in the dark.

    Then one morning, a woman from the Red Cross called my name—my real name, the one I had spoken only once since the barbed wire gates opened. She handed me a paper with a trembling smile and said, “Your brother. We think he’s in Paris, looking for you.”

    I stared at the words; the letters floated on the page, and I was simply unable to trust them. It felt like something conjured by hunger and half-sleep hope dressed up in someone else’s coat, but the seal was authentic, and the name… the name was spelled the way only family would know to spell it.

    “They’re making arrangements,” she added, softer now. “You’ll take the train.”

    My stomach tightened, twisting slowly, like someone winding a rope inside me. I hadn’t stepped on a train since the one that took me in the opposite direction, five years and a forever ago. I can still hear the bolts slam shut, feel the bodies pressing, and sense the fear lingering in the air, making it hard to breathe.

    I nodded, because that’s what you do. But later, in the quiet, I folded the paper in half and placed it beneath my shirt, over the hollow place where the locket used to rest. Just in case they were wrong. Just in case this was a mistake, I wanted to remember what I believed in.

    As the train rolled into Paris beneath a washed-out sky, I didn’t recognize the city—too many buildings still scorched, too many faces turned inward. I stepped down onto the platform at the ‘Gare de l’Est’ with the weight of foreign air in my lungs and borrowed shoes on my feet.

    A man stood near the barrier, thinner than I remembered, and aged more than I could have imagined. His eyes were roaming the crowd like a soldier scouting a battlefield, and when his regard finally landed on me, time froze.

    “Andreas?” His voice was cracking as he said it—fragile with disbelief, thick with sorrow. For a second, he stood frozen, then he began to walk—slow at first, then faster, as if each step chipped away at the fear that I might vanish again before he reached me.

    His eyes were shimmering from the tears, as he screamed “I thought you were dead,” more than once. I didn’t answer. We both knew how close it had come.

    We arrived in Marseille the next morning. Mathias brewed coffee that smelled like burned tin and told me how he and Maria had made it out of Berlin in early ’37, just before the border started tightening. He reached for a small wooden box and opened it on the table between us. Inside, wrapped in linen, was the locket.

    In time, the world insisted on continuing. I learned to live with what was left. The small rituals of survival. The kindness of routine. I worked in a print shop and walked along the docks. Every other month, I traveled back to Paris, to the Red Cross and other international aid organizations, seeking a thread of hope to find anything about Emil. But it was always in vain; I gained nothing but shadows as I wandered through a maze of dead ends, chasing the ghosts of a fading past.

    Part VIII – A future not yet written

    Grief is a ghost that learns to whisper, and time doesn’t make it disappear; it just teaches us how to follow at a distance. 

    The decades passed, and by the early 1980s, Berlin had changed its face again. The ruins were swept away, the streets repaved, and the flags were different. A wall now runs through the city’s heart, concrete and wire splitting east from west. One side marched to the calculated drum of Soviet control—strict, pinned beneath a regime that called itself people’s rule, though few believed it silent, while the other blinked in the neon dazzle of western capitalism.

    Matthias died ten years ago; it was a quiet passing. Maria followed a few years later. Their children, grown with families of their own, most of them only knew my name as one whispered at family gatherings or attached to fading photographs. I had become the quiet uncle from the war, the survivor, the one who never left.

    They planned a small celebration for my ninetieth—more an excuse to gather than anything else. I wasn’t fond of celebrating my old age, but I agreed to it anyway. I sat near the back garden for a while, letting the sounds of laughter and clinking glasses pass through me. Faces came and went—some familiar, others foreign to me but linked by our blood.

    Later in the afternoon, I needed a little bit of tranquility, so I retired to the house. That’s when she appeared, Sofia, a little girl with her grandmother’s dark Italian eyes and a head full of restless curiosity. She wandered toward me like a question that had been waiting to be asked.

    She didn’t say much at first, just watched me with that look children have when they sense something sacred and delicate in the room.

    She asked about my locket, so I took it off for her to examine it more closely. She held it up with both hands like something magnificent, a treasure fresh out of a fairytale, her young mind trying to figure out its purpose. I told her how to open it, and she then saw the pictures hidden inside.

    “Who are they?” she asked.

    I took it back from her gently, “Friends,” I said first. Then paused.

    “One of them was me.”

    She blinked up at me and said, “And the other?”

    I looked out the window. The sky beyond the trees was pale and bright, like the one we used to lie under, before the world we knew got interrupted.

    “Someone I never got to say goodbye to” I said as my eyes filled with tears.

    I pressed the locket into her hand, “Keep it,” I told her, my voice thin with age, “So you remember. So none of it disappears.”

    She nodded without fully understanding, and maybe that was the point. She didn’t need to know everything—not yet.

    One day, when the world forgets how to be kind—when the air feels heavy and history starts to crack at the seams—maybe she’ll open it again. And remember what it means to stand on the right side of it. To choose love over fear. Kindness over cruelty.

    Maybe she’ll remember the story of two boys by the river, laughing in the grass, of a world that turned against them. A lesson for a future not yet written—tucked inside the weight of a locket, passed from hand to hand across years no one was meant to remember.

    A reminder of what it means to be human.

    Author’s Reflection: This story began as a quiet reflection on queer lives erased by history, and became a warning whispered through time. Though fiction, it’s rooted in truth: Paragraph 175, the raids, the silences. The locket is just a symbol — but like all stories, it carries the weight of remembering what the world tried to forget.

    Have you ever watched human rights slip quietly away? Share your story in the comments below, because remembering our past is the first step to protecting our future.

  • Alien

    Alien

    Prologue

    They say when you move to a new country, you leave behind who you were. But no one talks about the ghost that follows you, silent and faithful, carrying all the parts you tried to bury.

    I wasn’t looking to escape my past when I left Europe. I carried it with me in quiet suitcases, zipped shut over the life I’d built and lost. Every cup, every photo frame, every shirt still carrying his scent – all gone now, given away or sold for coins that jingled in my pocket on the way to the airport.

    I told myself this was what rebirth looked like. But the truth is, rebirth isn’t a phoenix rising from ash. It’s crawling from the ruins with blistered knees and broken fingernails, whispering to the dawn, “I am still here.”

    And as the plane cut through darkness over the Atlantic, watching the stars burn cold above the clouds. I didn’t know if I was flying toward something, or simply away from everything I could no longer bear.

    But I knew one thing: I couldn’t turn back.

    Part I – Arrival

    I arrived in New York City in the trembling dawn of March 2020, just days before the borders shut like iron gates behind me, carrying with me nothing but two suitcases and a small bundle of savings in cash, just enough, I hoped, to keep me afloat until I could find work.

    The cab ride from JFK felt like drifting through a dream that hadn’t decided whether to be hopeful or nightmarish. A pale sun spilled across silent streets, washing the graffiti-covered brick walls in gold. Steam rose from sewer grates, curling around rows of shuttered shops like ghosts reluctant to leave.

    I pressed my forehead to the cold window and tried to picture what he would have said if he were here. “Look at this place, Sofia” he would have whispered, “It’s ugly and beautiful at the same time. Just like you said it would be.”

    I closed my eyes. His voice felt too real, too close, and I couldn’t bear the echo.

    We had dreamed of immigrating to the United States ever since we were kids, whispering promises of freedom under quiet European skies. We never knew exactly where we would land, only that it would be somewhere bigger, somewhere that could contain the versions of ourselves we couldn’t fit into that small village life.

    But when he died, the dream felt like broken glass in my chest. Sharp, pointless, impossible to hold.

    Still, I came.

    I had to.

    Part II – The Shut Door

    The apartment I rented smelled like bleach and old dust. It was barely furnished – a narrow bed, a scuffed table with two chairs, and a kettle whose handle burned my fingers the first time I used it.

    Within days of my arrival, the city that was supposed to be my rebirth became a locked cell. Streets emptied as if humanity had evaporated overnight. Stores closed one after another, metal gates pulled down over darkened windows. Ambulance sirens wailed through empty streets, their echoes weaving between silent towers like restless ghosts.

    I did have a work visa. Back home, I wept with relief the day the embassy stamped it into my passport. For a brief moment, it felt like I held proof in my hands – proof that after years of applications, interviews, and waiting, there was finally a place in this world willing to let me in.

    But that illusion shattered the moment I arrived. My visa allowed me entry, yes, but it wasn’t the end of the road. I still needed to apply for my work authorization status on-site in the United States to register my presence and unlock the rest of the process. Only then could I receive a Social Security Number. These nine digits meant I could legally exist in the systems that ran everything from employment to bank accounts.

    I didn’t know that the pandemic would close nearly every federal office before I even had the chance to submit my documents. Websites were outdated, forms were unclear, and phone calls were routed to endless voicemails with messages stating “Due to the current health crisis, processing times will be delayed indefinitely.” Each recorded voice felt like a door slamming shut. Each unreturned call was another reminder that I was no one here – a ghost in a city of locked buildings and shuttered help desks.

    Without that number, I couldn’t open a bank account or set up the services everyone else takes for granted. I couldn’t sign a proper lease or get a job to pay rent. For most people born here, having a Social Security Number is so automatic they hardly remember when they first memorised it – it’s like breathing, a silent proof of existence stamped into their lives from birth. But for me, trying to live without it felt like trying to lift a mountain with bare hands. And because no one ever has to think about it, they couldn’t understand why I struggled so hard just to buy groceries, to keep the lights on, to find a safe place to sleep. Without that number, I wasn’t just invisible. I was nothing.

    So I spent my days refreshing immigration websites, scrolling through the same sentences over and over again, each click feeling like scratching at a locked door with bleeding fingers, praying that someone, somewhere, might finally open it.

    At night, the apartment swallowed my thoughts whole. I would lie under thin blankets, watching headlights crawl across the ceiling, listening to my own breathing just to remember I was still alive.

    Part III – Blake

    At night, when the loneliness pressed hardest against my chest, I scrolled through old messages with Blake, the young American woman I’d befriended online while learning English. She was twenty-seven, bright and fast-talking, with a humour I never quite understood but always appreciated. We had spent countless evenings video chatting before I moved, her teaching me slang phrases and me teaching her fragments of French poetry. She had promised to take me thrifting in Brooklyn, show me the best dumpling shops in Chinatown, and introduce me to her friends from her academic circles. “You’re going to love it here,” she had said. “It’ll be your fresh start.”

    But after I arrived, her replies changed. They became shorter, clipped, cautious. I knew something was wrong the day she left my last message on read for over a week. Eventually, I saw her posts trickle through my feed – photos of her and her new husband, a man with an American flag profile frame and a gaze that seemed to pierce the camera like a challenge. His captions were always barbed with anger about lockdowns, “fake news media,” and how immigrants were ruining the country. He shared articles about conspiracies that blamed foreigners for everything from job losses to the virus itself, their headlines screaming half-truths and twisted statistics.

    Sometimes, I wondered if she believed any of it. Or if she just stayed quiet to keep the peace in her own home. I saw fewer photos of her alone. Fewer posts about art and volunteering. More photos of his truck, his guns lined up on a polished wooden table, flags hanging over their patio in silent, righteous judgment.

    I imagined her reading my messages late at night when he was asleep beside her. I pictured her thumb hovering over the keyboard, wanting to reply but hearing his breath deepen next to her, feeling the warmth of his body and the weight of her own silence. Maybe she told herself she would respond tomorrow. Maybe she told herself she hadn’t seen it. Perhaps she believed that ignoring me was safer or kinder.

    Eventually, her replies stopped altogether. And I understood. Her world had shifted under her feet, just as mine had. But while I was trapped in a studio apartment in a city that didn’t know my name, she was trapped in a house with a man who hated everything I represented. Our silences became the bridge between us, stretched thin over a chasm neither of us dared cross.

    Part IV – Tea at Dawn

    Every morning, I woke before dawn, when the city was still holding its breath in the dark. I shuffled across the cold linoleum floor, wrapping my sweater tighter around my shoulders. The kettle rattled as it heated, steam curling up in pale ribbons that disappeared into the cracked ceiling above. I was always careful not to touch its scorched handle, after burning my fingers the first morning in a moment of sleepy carelessness that left a red mark for days.

    I made weak tea in a chipped mug I found tucked behind dusty plates in the cupboard, its faded print reading “World’s Best Dad.” I sometimes wondered who had left it behind and whether they had missed it. I held the mug with both hands, letting the gentle warmth seep into my stiff fingers, then my wrists, then deeper into the ache of my bones. Outside, the sky lightened slowly over silent rooftops, turning from charcoal to ash to the palest blue.

    I would sit at the narrow table, knees pressed against the wood, breathing in the faint scent of tea leaves mixed with city dust, and I whispered into the dim room, “I am still here.”

    Persistence, I realised, isn’t fighting battles with raised fists or demanding the world bend to your will. Sometimes, it’s simply waking up again. It’s the quiet refusal to die in a place that doesn’t want you, the small act of boiling water and drinking tea, proof to yourself that even without a plan or a promise, you chose to stay.

    Part V – Paper Walls

    Bills kept arriving – mostly rent notices and reminders from the landlord about additional fees, each envelope a reminder that I was alive but still invisible. I couldn’t even set up proper utility accounts without that nine-digit number, so everything was funneled through temporary arrangements and cash payments that drained what little savings I had left. Rent, electricity, phone credit – all demanding proof of my existence in a country that hadn’t yet decided if it would let me stay. I spent hours filling out forms for benefits I wasn’t eligible for, jobs I couldn’t legally start, and assistance programs that were suspended under emergency orders.

    Each form forced me to prove myself in ways I never imagined back home: scans of bank statements I didn’t have, proof of immunisations I couldn’t translate, certified copies of certificates for a life that no longer existed.

    When the exhaustion grew too heavy, I would push the papers away and sit in silence, staring at the cracked paint on the wall, wondering how many others before me had sat in this very spot, feeling just as small.

    Part VI – The Forum

    One evening, after another silent day spent filling out forms and checking unopened emails, I found myself staring at my phone long past midnight. The apartment was dark except for the glow of the screen reflecting in the window, casting my tired eyes back at me.

    I typed “USA immigrant support” into the search bar, not really expecting anything. But a forum appeared – a simple website with no fancy colours or branding, just lines of posts cascading down the screen like an endless prayer wall. People were pleading for information about visas stuck in limbo, venting anger at politicians and agencies that never replied, sharing tiny victories: a work permit finally approved, a neighbour dropping off groceries, a call from home that didn’t end in tears.

    Their stories made my chest ache with recognition. I realised how many of us were floating in the same silent ocean, unable to see each other in the dark.

    I introduced myself, my fingers trembling as I hit ‘Post.’ I wrote simply: “New here. Alone. Don’t know what to do next.”

    Within minutes, replies began to appear:

    – “Hang in there, sis.”
    – “I’ve been where you are. It gets better.”
    – “Message me if you need to talk. I’m serious.”

    I read them over and over, blinking away tears that burned hot against my tired skin. Their words felt like warm hands pressing gently against my back, keeping me upright when my own strength faltered.

    After that night, I began posting daily reflections – small notes about the sunrise over rusted rooftops, the taste of watery instant coffee, the wail of sirens fading into dawn. Words to prove I was still here. Words to remind someone else that they were too.

    And it was there, among those midnight conversations and flickering threads of hope, that I first came across Lina.

    Part VII – Lina

    Her username was BabushkaNYC. I almost scrolled past it, thinking she was someone’s grandmother just learning to use the internet. But her post caught my eye. The title read: “Need help with online forms, please.”

    Inside, her words were short and hesitant, typed in fractured English: “Hello. I Lina. I need help. Food stamps application. My English is no good. Thank you.”

    I clicked on her profile and saw she had joined the forum only the day before. Her bio simply said: “Immigrant. Alone. Queens.” Something in my chest tightened, as if a wire was pulling me forward. I sent her a private message before I could overthink it.

    “Hi Lina, I can help with your forms. Let me know when you’re free to talk.”

    She replied almost immediately. “Thank you. Video call? I not type much.”

    That evening, I sat at my small kitchen table, brushing my hair back and wiping the fatigue from under my eyes before clicking ‘Accept’ on the call. The screen flickered, and there she was – a thin woman with soft grey hair pulled back in a bun, her face lined with years of worry and resilience. Behind her, faded floral wallpaper peeled from the walls in curling strips.

    “Hello, dear,” she said, her voice trembling but warm. “You are… from Europe, да?”

    I nodded, surprised. “How did you know?”

    “Your name,” she smiled. “And your eyes. They are tired eyes, like mine.”

    We worked through the forms slowly. Lina’s hands shook when she tried to hold up her ID to the camera. Arthritis, she explained. The pain was bad in the winter. Her children were back home in Belarus, unable to visit since the borders closed. She hadn’t seen some of them in over two years.

    As we filled out the questions line by line, she told me stories of her village. Of how she used to bake rye bread in a clay oven outside her house. Of her husband, gone now ten years. How quiet the apartment felt at night when all she could hear was the hum of the refrigerator and the clatter of the heating pipes.

    When we finally finished, she pressed her palms together in thanks. Tears pooled in her milky brown eyes. “You are a good girl,” she said softly. “God sent you to me.”

    After that, we spoke every few days. Sometimes about forms, and sometimes just to pass the long hours. One morning, Lina confessed she hadn’t eaten fresh vegetables in weeks. She was too afraid to go outside with the virus spreading, and delivery cost more than her pension could cover.

    Without thinking, I offered to go for her. I had gone out just the day before, and it was terrifying – stepping onto streets still echoing with sirens, masked strangers weaving around me like ghosts. But Lina needed help, and I was here for her. The grocery store line snaked down the block. I held a screenshot of her list on my phone, reading the neat Cyrillic letters she had written, picturing her hunched over her table as she wrote them.

    When I finally knocked on her door and she opened it a crack, her eyes lit up like the sun breaking through storm clouds. “You are an angel,” she whispered.

    “No,” I said, placing the bags on her doorstep “Just someone trying to put some good in the universe”.

    Part VIII – The Letter

    Winter melted reluctantly into spring, though some mornings still bit at my skin with a cold sharp enough to bring tears to my eyes. But the days grew longer, and sometimes I caught the scent of thawing earth drifting up from cracks in the pavement.

    I kept helping Lina. Each visit became more than groceries and forms. I would sit on her doorstep, sipping the coffee she brewed strong enough to wake the dead, while she spoke of Belarus – of birch forests and old Orthodox churches with bells so heavy they shook the ground when they tolled. She told me about her son, who serves for the army back home. She showed me photos of him on her old phone, his face framed by dark hair and a serious gaze that softened whenever she spoke his name.

    Sometimes she would pause mid-story, her eyes glassy, and say, “You remind me of him. Not your face, but… something here,” and she would tap her chest lightly.

    I didn’t tell her, but hearing about him brought me a quiet comfort I didn’t fully understand. There was a loneliness in her that mirrored my own. Sitting there on the cold concrete outside her door, I felt like we were two exiles building a small island together, safe for a few hours from the currents of a world that didn’t want to claim us.

    Days turned into weeks. My savings are sinking lower with each rent payment. The landlord left terse notes under my door. I sent out job applications by the dozen, knowing none would move forward without that nine-digit proof of existence.

    Each morning, I checked the mailbox in the lobby, my pulse quickening every time I saw a white envelope. But it was always bills, or advertisements for things I couldn’t buy, or notices reminding me that without proper status, eviction was only a signature away.

    One Tuesday, after spending the morning helping Lina renew her utilities assistance, I returned home exhausted. The apartment felt darker than usual. I dropped my keys on the counter, kicked off my shoes, and sat at the small table, my head cradled in my hands. I thought about calling Lina back just to hear her voice, but even that felt too heavy.

    For hours, I sat there, staring at nothing, until the dusk painted shadows across the walls. Hunger gnawed at my stomach, but I had no appetite. Instead, I boiled water, made my usual cup of tea, and sat on my bed watching the city lights blink alive one by one.

    That’s when I noticed something under the door – a slip of white against the dim lobby carpet. My chest tightened. Slowly, I stood and crossed the room, my bare feet silent against the cold floorboards. I bent down and picked it up. It was an envelope, thick and official-looking. For a moment, confusion flickered through my mind – how did it get here?

    Then I saw a small handwritten note taped to the corner: “This was in my box by mistake. Thought it looked important. – Leo, 3B.”

    Leo. I didn’t know him, but I’d heard quiet guitar chords drifting from his apartment some nights, soft melodies that made the cracked walls feel less empty. I remembered hearing once through the hallway vent that he’d lost his job recently – I didn’t know where he worked or what he did, only that he seems to playing more often after that. There was a gentleness in his playing that felt like a promise I didn’t yet understand.

    My hands trembled as I turned the envelope over, reading the return address in bold, government-printed letters. I pressed it to my chest and closed my eyes. Tears welled up, hot and unstoppable, though I wasn’t ready to open it yet. Instead, I whispered a silent prayer to my late husband, to my friendship with Lina, to Leo – this stranger who unknowingly carried hope to my door – and went to bed.

    Because in that moment, holding the unopened letter under the flickering kitchen light, I felt something shift inside me– something like hope uncoiling after a long, silent winter.

    And though I didn’t know what the next day would bring, I knew one thing for sure:

    Tomorrow, everything might finally change.

    Part IX – Becoming

    The next morning, sunlight streamed through the thin curtains, painting gold across the cracked walls. I sat at the kitchen table, the unopened envelope resting before me like a sleeping animal, its presence heavy with promise.

    I let myself savour that quiet moment before knowing–before reality returned to claim me. I made coffee, strong coffee, the way Lina likes it. I sat and watched the steam curl into the morning light, breathing in its warmth, letting it settle the shaking in my chest.

    Finally, with trembling fingers, I tore it open.

    Inside was a single page. My Social Security Number, printed in black ink that seemed to glow under the powerful sunlight. Nine digits that meant I could finally exist here. I could get a job. I could pay rent without fear. I could begin again.

    Tears blurred the numbers, and I pressed the paper to my chest, letting silent sobs shake through me, releasing months–no, years–of fear and grief I hadn’t realised I’d been holding so tightly.

    I thought of my husband then, of the day we sat on our tiny balcony back home, his arm wrapped around my shoulders as we planned our life across an ocean neither of us had seen. I whispered to the quiet room, “I made it, love. I made it.”

    Later that morning, I called Lina to share the news with her. She cried too, whispering blessings in Russian I didn’t understand but felt deep in my bones.

    That afternoon, I walked out into the city with a strange lightness in my step. The sidewalks were alive again, lined with café tables and people sipping iced coffees under pale spring skies. Children laughed in the park, their voices carried on the breeze like music. Even the pigeons seemed less desperate, pecking at breadcrumbs with quiet satisfaction.

    I paused in front of a bakery window, my reflection merging with racks of fresh bread and golden pastries inside. For the first time since arriving, I saw not a foreigner, not a widow, not an invisible shadow slipping between crowded streets – but simply a woman becoming.

    Becoming brave enough to stay. Becoming strong enough to begin again. Becoming someone who owns her past without letting it drown her future.

    And as I stood there, letting the morning sun warm my face, I felt it fully – the truth I had whispered to myself all those dark mornings:

    I am still here.

    And finally, I was ready to see where it could take me next.

    Later that evening, after the sun dipped behind rooftop water towers and the air turned cool with summer’s promise, I knocked softly on 3B. When the door opened, there he stood – tall, tired-eyed, guitar propped against the wall behind him.

    “Hey, Leo,” I said, my voice trembling with quiet courage. “Thank you… for the letter. I… I was wondering if you’d like to come over for dinner tomorrow night. I’d love to cook something to say thank you properly.”

    He blinked, surprised, then smiled – just a flicker, but enough to make my chest tighten with something unfamiliar and warm.

    “Yeah,” he said softly. “I’d like that.”

    For the first time since arriving in this city, I felt the invisible threads of my life beginning to weave into something more than survival.

    And just like a whispered promise, our story faded into tomorrow.

    Author’s Reflection: This story echoes my own journey as an immigrant arriving in a country I barely understood, during a time when the world felt like it was coming to an end. While Sofia’s path is fictional, her quiet persistence, her isolation, and her moments of silent triumph are drawn from memories of my first mornings here, holding tea in trembling hands, wondering if I’d made the greatest mistake or taken the bravest step of my life. “Alien” is a reminder that reinvention isn’t about dramatic rebirths but about choosing, every single day, to keep becoming me.

     Does this journey remind you of your own? Share your story in the comments below – your words might remind someone else that persistence is always worth it.

  • The Whisper of Tomorrow

    The Whisper of Tomorrow

    Prologue

    They always told her life was a lottery. That some were born with winning tickets clutched tight in soft, uncalloused hands, while others, like her, scraped at empty pockets, waiting for rain that never fell.

    But by the time Mira was twenty-eight, she was tired of waiting. Tired of rusty mornings where her alarm clock screamed at 6 a.m. and she rose with a heart heavy as concrete, bracing for the day’s inevitable punches. She worked in a fluorescent-lit office typing numbers into a system that no one cared to understand. Her coworkers droned about sports scores and reality shows she never watched. By night, she’d curl under a moth-eaten blanket in her studio apartment, scrolling endless feeds of people who smiled bigger, lived bolder, and seemed born to a destiny that mocked her from behind polished glass screens.

    She had never heard of the Law of Attraction until that Thursday in November.

    PART I – The Encounter

    It was raining. Not a gentle drizzle but an unrepentant storm slamming the city sidewalks in heavy sheets. Mira ducked into a bookstore to escape. She never meant to buy anything – she didn’t even like reading, truth be told. Words felt slow to her restless mind.

    She wandered past fiction, past glossy magazines screaming diets and headlines of doom, until her eyes landed on a small, unassuming book titled “The Whisper of Tomorrow.”

    She picked it up. The subtitle read: “Harnessing The Law of Attraction to Shape Your Life.”

    She scoffed, almost put it back. But something inside her – maybe desperation, maybe hope – held her still.

    The shopkeeper, an older woman with deep smile lines etched around her eyes, caught her gaze. “That one,” she said softly, “changed my life.”

    Mira paid for it in quiet defeat, telling herself it would gather dust on her kitchen table. But that night, as thunder rolled like ancient drums, she cracked it open.

    PART II – The Awakening

    The first line read:

    “Your thoughts are the seeds of your reality. If you plant them in darkness, you harvest shadows. But if you plant them in light, you harvest dawn.”

    Mira frowned. She read on.

    The book spoke not of wishful thinking or naive optimism, but of an ancient principle: What you dwell upon becomes your world. The Law of Attraction, it explained, was not magic but magnetism. Thoughts carry energy, and energy seeks its likeness. A mind soaked in bitterness summons bitterness; a mind drenched in gratitude summons blessings.

    “Your mind is a lighthouse,” the author wrote, “casting beams into the vast ocean of possibility. Ships come to the light you shine. Choose what you illuminate.”

    That night, she lay awake hearing those words echo. What light have I been shining?

    PART III – The Experiment

    She decided to test it. The next morning, still half-skeptical, she sat on her rickety kitchen chair and whispered:

    “Today will bring me kindness. I am worthy of love. I am a beacon of calm and good fortune.”

    She felt ridiculous. But as she left her building, umbrella bobbing against the grey sky, an elderly neighbor stopped her at the stoop. Usually, the man just grunted in her direction, but today he smiled and said, “Stay dry out there, dear.”

    Mira paused. It was nothing. And yet, for the first time in months, she felt noticed, connected, as if life had nodded back at her.

    PART IV – The Shift

    Each morning, she added a new intention. Some days felt no different. She spilled coffee on her blouse, missed the train, and got into an argument with her supervisor. But she kept the practice. Each night, she wrote three things that went well, no matter how small:

    “I finished my report early. The train had a seat open. The sunset was golden lavender tonight.”

    After a week, she noticed a change in her posture. She stood straighter. Her voice steadied in meetings. Colleagues began asking her for help. Her ideas, once drowned in doubt, now sprouted with quiet confidence.

    One evening, she wrote:

    “I attract people who value me. I attract opportunities that align with my talents. I am open to good.”

    PART V – The Skeptic

    Her best friend, Leo, scoffed when she told him.

    “The Law of Attraction? Come on, Mira. Do you think thinking happy thoughts will pay the rent? Manifest me a pizza, then.”

    But Mira smiled softly. She wasn’t manifesting pizzas. She was manifesting peace. And soon, it seemed, more than peace.

    Two weeks later, she received an email from an editor at a local online magazine. They’d seen her design portfolio (which she’d only recently updated, fueled by her new self-belief). They offered her a freelance gig to create illustrations for their feature articles.

    Leo blinked at her in disbelief. “Okay…maybe manifest me a girlfriend next.”

    PART VI – The Shadows Return

    But growth is never a straight line. There came a Monday when her freelance payment was delayed, her landlord threatened eviction over a technicality, and her boss blamed her for a mistake she hadn’t made.

    That night, she threw the book across her kitchen floor.

    “What good is positive thinking when the world just crushes you anyway?”

    She cried, deep gut-wrenching sobs that left her hollow and trembling. At dawn, eyes swollen, she picked up the book from the floor. It fell open to a page she hadn’t read before:

    “The Law of Attraction is not to erase shadows, but to remind you that you are the light. Even the brightest dawn casts a shadow. Feel your pain, acknowledge it, but then rise back to your higher thought.”

    She inhaled. Exhaled. Closed her eyes and whispered, “I choose to rise once more..”

    PART VII – The Transformation

    Days turned to weeks. Mira’s small design gig expanded into regular freelance contracts. Her boss noticed her improved work ethic and offered her a role with more creative tasks. She negotiated a raise, small but symbolic of her newfound self-worth.

    But the real change was internal. She woke with anticipation instead of dread. She smiled at strangers without fearing rejection. Her world shifted because she shifted.

    She understood now: the Law of Attraction was never about commanding the universe like a spoiled child. It was about tuning her mind to gratitude, possibility, and action. Positive thinking was not about denying darkness, but about illuminating the path ahead.

    PART VIII – The Teacher

    One evening, Leo called, voice trembling.

    “Mira…I lost my job. I don’t know what to do.”

    She listened patiently. When his sobs softened, she said:

    “Leo, I don’t have the answers. But I do know this – your mind is a lighthouse. Right now, you’re shining fear. Ships of despair are docking at your shore. Try shining hope instead. Just try. Even if it feels stupid.”

    He laughed weakly. “You’re such a hippie now.”

    “Yeah,” she smiled, “maybe. But I’ve never felt more powerful.”

    PART IX – Never Giving Up

    Years later, Mira stood before a class of university students, teaching them the fundamentals of design thinking. On the wall behind her hung a quote in painted letters:

    “The mind is everything. What you think, you become.”

    She paused, looking at their young, anxious faces. She told them her story – of the thunderstorm bookstore, of the nights alone in a studio apartment lit only by streetlamp glow, of the Law of Attraction not as magic, but as a mirror reflecting what we dare to believe.

    They listened, rapt and silent.

    Before dismissing them, she said, “You are not here merely to learn a craft. You are here to shape your life. Remember this: The world is not happening to you. The world is happening through you. And it will bloom in the light you choose to cast.”

    That evening, Mira walked home beneath a sky streaked with molten gold and violet dusk. She paused at a storefront window, saw her reflection there–confident, calm, alive–and whispered to it like a prayer:

    “Thank you. For never giving up. For believing before you saw.”

    And the world whispered back, “Thank you. For becoming who you always were.”

    Author’s Reflection: This story serves as a reminder that positive thinking and the Law of Attraction are not spells, but seeds that can grow into something meaningful. They require nurturing, patience, and action. Like Mira, you can choose which thoughts to water. The rest will follow.