A love story written in the ink of loss.
Noah Carter never believed in happy endings - not since his father's funeral, not since the world taught him that love always comes with an expiration date. Then he collided with Lena Park on the library steps, and for the first time, he dared to hope. With her dog-eared books and reckless laughter, Lena taught him how to live in the fragile spaces between heartbeats.
But Lena was living on borrowed time.
When the headaches start, when the fainting spells begin, when the doctors say those three irrevocable words - "inoperable," "untreatable," "terminal" - their love story becomes a countdown. Noah watches helplessly as the girl who once swam in midnight oceans forgets how to open pill bottles. As the woman who quoted Virginia Woolf by heart struggles to remember his name. As the love of his life fades to a ghost in a hospice bed, still beautiful, still his, still dying.
In the aftermath, Noah drowns in the silence she left behind. Her sweater loses her scent. The ferns she loved wither from neglect. The world keeps turning, indifferent to his grief. Until he finds her final gift - twelve letters, one for each month without her, each a dagger and a lifeline:
"If you're reading this, I've been dead for thirty days. Go to our diner. Order my pancakes. Tell them Lena says hi. Then come home and scream until you can't breathe. Repeat as needed."
A harrowing portrait of love and loss, "The Earth Remembers You (But I Can't Forget)" is an elegy for the living - for those left behind in the wreckage of forever. This is not a story about moving on. This is a story about learning how to drown in someone's absence and still find the will to surface, gasp by painful gasp.
A love story that will carve its name into your bones and leave you bleeding.
author here was feeling kinda down so I wrote this short story 🥲🥲 wanted to portray a more tragic storyline but this is the best I can do at the moment thnx