"It wasn't that the world had forgotten him…It was that the world was never sure he existed in the first place."
The grass whispered louder than the voices of men.
Lengaza walked alone across the wide field behind a crumbling old village. His hands were in his pockets, his shoulders slightly hunched, and his hair was the kind that curled without asking for permission—wild and soft, like it belonged to the wind.
He talked to himself.
Not because he was strange,
But because…
There was no one else who ever stayed long enough to listen.
"It's fine," he mumbled, his voice barely louder than a thought.
"I wouldn't remember me either."
A crow cawed. It didn't fly away.
The villagers—what was left of them—sometimes waved at him when they saw him by the well. Then they'd pause, furrow their brows, and ask each other, "Who was that again?"
By nightfall, his footprints would fade. By morning, the villagers would forget they ever saw him.
Lengaza wasn't a ghost.
He breathed. He ached. He could bleed.
But he lived on the edge of the world's memory.
Like a song that had almost ended.
That day, the sky was bruised with purple clouds.
Lengaza knelt beside a dying flower. He whispered something. A word—soft and trembling—left his lips.
The flower bloomed. Not just bloomed—it blushed awake, stretching toward the voice that had called it back to life.
"Still got it," he said quietly.
"Even if no one else does."
He stood up. Brushed his knees. Kept walking. The wind played with his sleeves like a bored child tugging at a parent's coat.
"Maybe I should stop talking to myself," he said.
"But then who would talk back?"
He gave a half-smile, the kind that never reached the eyes.
And then… he paused.
On the far end of the field, by a crooked fence,
stood a girl.
Watching him.
Still.
Lengaza blinked.
"Can you see me?" he asked aloud.
The girl didn't speak.
Didn't move.
Didn't smile.
Then, just as the wind shifted, her body flickered—like smoke chased by wind.
And she was gone.
Only a feather floated in the air where she'd stood.
Lengaza didn't chase it. He didn't have to.
He simply turned around, looked up at the sky and whispered,
"Nyra…"