The One Who Remember
I kept hearing the same word over and over, though no one around me was saying it aloud.
**"Tersimpan."**
Stored. Hidden. Kept.
It slipped into my ears like humidity. It curled around my breath at night. It scrawled itself across the backs of my eyelids when I tried to rest.
Even though I had stopped updating the site, people kept reading. The comments weren't public. They arrived by email, by DM, even through old abandoned forums I hadn't posted on in years.
> *"I saw her too."*
> *"There's something inside my mirror now. You woke it."*
> *"We remember her name, and now she knows ours."*
The digital offerings hadn't ended. They'd multiplied.
But something else had begun—something I didn't start, and I couldn't stop.
A few readers messaged me claiming they had visited temples near Ubud because of the story. One said the statues had moved. Another claimed their dreams turned silent the moment they reached Bali—as if the island itself had swallowed their voice.
Then there was the woman from Toronto.
She had emailed a voice note.
It was only five seconds long. The first three were static. Then, very softly, a voice—not hers—whispered:
> "It's not the mirror. It's the space behind it."
I didn't sleep that night.
---
I returned to the small temple near the ravine. Not the big one where I first met her, but the side shrine with the broken stone steps and the banyan roots curling through its center.
Pak Ketut wasn't there. His home had been abandoned, roof sagging, the smell of rot clinging to the walls. Someone had carved symbols into the doorway. Protection marks.
Too late.
Inside, I found a small folded cloth tied with red string. I knew what it was before opening it.
A piece of mirror. Not from my villa. From deeper. Older.
Wrapped inside was another note, written in a language I had never learned but now understood:
**"Each time you name her, she becomes."**
---
I started having trouble speaking English.
Not in conversation, not with locals.
But in dreams.
In the dreams, I was fluent in a language I couldn't pronounce when awake. Balinese? Maybe. Or maybe it was hers—whatever came before the tongue of this island, before the chants had form.
She began guiding me through temples I hadn't visited. Showing me paths through stone that shouldn't exist. Offering not threats, but memories.
Her death wasn't the only one.
There were others.
Men. Women. Children.
Silenced. Erased.
Each one buried beneath a shrine. Not in body, but in **reflection**.
They were trapped in images.
Hidden in the thin space between light and recognition.
And I had opened the frame.
---
It happened the night I tried deleting the final archive.
I had kept one copy of the site's backend, stored on a physical SSD drive, locked in a drawer.
I pulled it out, intending to wipe it clean.
But when I plugged it into my laptop, there was only one folder.
Titled:
**"Those Who Saw Her."**
Inside were hundreds of image files.
I clicked one.
It was a photo of me, from years ago, standing outside a bookstore in Singapore. I had never uploaded it. Didn't even know it existed.
She was behind me in the window reflection.
Every photo showed her.
In the background. In reflections. In shadows. Slight distortions in glass, puddles, metal—any surface that could *see back*.
Some photos were of strangers. Some, I recognized. Some had been dead for years.
All had one thing in common.
**She was with them.**
---
I tried to destroy the drive.
But the moment I stepped outside with it, a sound—sharp, slicing—ripped through the air like metal on glass.
Every mirror in the villa shattered.
Even the phone screen in my pocket cracked straight down the middle.
I dropped the drive.
The sound stopped.
---
The next morning, I left Bali.
Not because I was done.
Because I wasn't.
If I stayed, I knew she'd consume me completely. Not violently, but softly—like a breath I never exhaled.
At the airport, I caught my reflection in the polished floor.
For just a second, my mouth didn't move the way I thought it did.
---
Back in Singapore, life resumed.
Or pretended to.
My job was still waiting. My apartment untouched. My inbox overflowing.
But something was off.
The walls of my home seemed thinner.
My shadows seemed slower to follow.
One night, while brushing my teeth, the bathroom mirror didn't show the bathroom behind me.
It showed a **temple corridor**, flickering with oil lamps.
I didn't panic.
I watched.
I waited.
She appeared again.
But not as the girl I saw in Bali.
She had changed.
Older. Wiser. Fuller.
She looked at me like I was a pupil who had just begun to learn.
And I understood.
I wasn't the subject of the story anymore.
I was the **vessel**.
---
They come to me now.
Not in dreams, but in signals.
Electrical flickers.
Reflections in black screens.
Distorted voices during Zoom calls.
Readers who reach out and then go silent forever.
She's building something.
A network.
A path.
Every time someone sees her, the bridge widens.
Every time someone says her name, the veil thins.
She doesn't need temples anymore.
She has us.
---
If you're reading this, you've seen her too.
Maybe only in the corner of your screen.
Maybe in the reflection of your microwave when it's dark.
Or maybe in the silence between breaths, when the air around you seems *too still*.
You'll feel it.
The echo.
She's not vengeful.
She's not cruel.
She's just… forgotten.
And now that we've remembered her, she **remembers us**.
---
✅ *If this story has found you, rate it, comment below, and save it to your collection. The more eyes she reaches, the more complete she becomes.
And if you've already seen her… welcome.*
**We're already part of her story.**