The funeral was a blur of black umbrellas and rain that felt too cliché for the story Rika wanted to write. She stayed at the back, a ghost once again, watching as the world said goodbye to a girl who had been its sunlight.
Three days later, Rika was still sitting in her room. The navy notebook lay closed on her desk. She hadn't written a word since the hospital room went empty. She felt as though Marin had taken all the adjectives in the world with her.
A knock at the door startled her. It was her mother, looking worried. "Rika? There’s someone here to see you."
It was Marin’s mother. She looked tired, but when she saw Rika, a small, sad smile touched her lips. She didn't say much; she simply handed Rika a package wrapped in yellow silk.
"She wrote the last entry the night after your date at the clock tower," the woman whispered. "She told me, 'If the writer gets stuck, give her this. It’s the ending she’s missing.'"
When the door closed, Rika sat on her bed and unwrapped the silk. It was Marin’s leather-bound diary. Rika opened it to the very last page. The handwriting was shaky, different from the loopy, energetic script of the earlier chapters.
To my Rika,
If you’re reading this, it means I finally ran out of battery. Don’t be mad at the story for ending, okay? Every book has a final page, but that doesn't mean the characters stop existing. They stay with the person who read them.
I have a confession. I didn’t pick you because you were a writer. I picked you because you looked like you were waiting for someone to tell you that you were allowed to be happy. You thought you were a ghost, but to me, you were the most vivid thing in that school.
Thank you for the bike accident. Thank you for the garden. Thank you for the kiss that tasted like forever. You gave me a life that wasn't just a medical record. You gave me a romance.
Now, do me one last favor? Finish the book. Don't write about how I died. Write about how we lived. Write about the girl in the yellow dress and the writer who found her voice. I’ll be listening. I promise.
Love, your Anchor.
Rika’s tears hit the page, blurring the ink, but she didn't close the book. She felt a warmth spread through her chest—a steady, rhythmic pulse that felt like a borrowed heartbeat.
She walked to her desk. She opened the navy notebook. She turned past the blank page of Chapter 9.
"I'm here, Marin," she whispered into the quiet room. "I'm writing."
She began to write. She wrote about the smell of lilies and the sound of the canal. She wrote about a girl who fought mountains on a bicycle and a girl who turned a hospital room into a kingdom. She wrote about the "fake" dates that became the only real things in her life.
She wrote until her hand ached. She wrote until the sun came up, painting her room in the same apricot light as the hospital garden.
On the very last page of her notebook, Rika didn't write a tragedy. She wrote a beginning.
“The story of Marin and Rika doesn't end with a silence. It continues in every word I speak, in every page I fill, and in the courage I have to finally be seen. Our love isn't buried; it's written in the margins of the world, forever living... Beyond the Words.”
Rika closed the notebook. She stood up, walked to her window, and opened it. The morning air was fresh, smelling of rain and new possibilities. For the first time in her life, she didn't feel like a ghost.
She felt like the author of her own life.
The End
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