2025.08.15
Jane was always obsessed with the stories that told people who told them. As the town’s unofficial “memory keeper”, he just did his days to collect pieces of other lives-scratching, listening conversation, photos kept in other-handed books. She used to assemble them as a luxury, sew the past that no one was, yet everyone was concerned.
A rain afternoon, Jane discovered a box at the missing railway station’s attic. There were journals found inside it, each page was shaking with ink, which had been blurred for decades. Handwriting moved from the beautiful loop to the scrolls quickly, as the author’s emotions spread faster than his pen. He read about lovers separated from the oceans, a girl’s secret contract with the river, a man who made boats but never traveled them.
Jane didn’t just record these stories – she re -imagined her. She would stand on the edge of the market, and tell strangers to pieces, and allow the listener to change the end in terms of mood. For that, the reality was less important than the feeling of the story behind.
His own life was barely present in these stories. Some people thought the reason was that he had no story, but Jane knew better. His story was a tapestry that was made in hundreds of others, hidden but integral.
That night, when he closed the last journal, he imagined someone decades later, looking for his words in an old box, surprised about the girl who collected memories of other people and made them their own. She smiled, knowing that she lives there too – between lines, in the shadow of sentences.