Slowthrob Stories

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is my first English story, and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I had creating all these characters, and how slowly I cried over the plot :') The first time I saw her, I didn't know her name. She was standing by the river, light folding over her like water itself, and I thought - for a moment - that she might be a part of the mist, or a memory I had somehow carried with me. She didn't speak. Her eyes were quiet, endless, and when they met mine, I felt the strange, impossible weight of a life I had never lived pressing against my chest. I turned away, but the feeling stayed. The echo of her presence clung to me like a shadow. I could almost hear the brush of her footsteps beside mine, though I walked alone. Since then, there have been days that seemed ordinary. And days that were not. The days I remembered Yuan. Each one a small unraveling, a soft pull between what is and what is no longer, a reminder that some people do not belong entirely to the world - yet leave everything they touch trembling with their absence. And I have learned, slowly, that remembering her is not the same as keeping her.