Prompt #2: The past follows you when you move to a new city for a fresh start
The rain falls in thick, slanting sheets, turning the Mumbai streets into mirrors of grey and gold. Manasi steps out of the auto-rickshaw, her shoes already soaked through. She hauls two suitcases — one stuffed with clothes, the other with books and broken habits — toward the narrow staircase of her new apartment building.
It’s not much. A third-floor flat above a dhaba that smells like yesterday's samosas and tomorrow’s regrets. But it’s hers.
She pauses at the threshold, water dripping from her hair onto her forehead. Her heart pounds like thunder behind her ribs — not from effort, but from what she left behind: an apology unsent, a dream shelved, a name she no longer says aloud.
Pune or Delhi? It doesn’t matter now. Both cities are ghosts tucked inside her phone gallery and old notebooks.
Inside, the apartment is small but clean. The walls are bare, painted in that institutional shade of off-white that says nothing happened here yet. There’s a faint smell of dampness and something else — ambition, maybe—or just mold.
She drops the suitcases by the door and walks to the window. Outside, the city pulses under the monsoon sky. Umbrellas bloom like dark mushrooms on the sidewalk below. A chai stall vendor wipes down his counter for the tenth time in five minutes.
Manasi exhales. For the first time in weeks, she feels still.
She opens her laptop. The screen glows against the dim room. On Notion, she clicks delete after delete — entire pages vanish with a flick of her finger. Old work notes, to-do lists from a job she quit, shared boards with people who stopped caring, relationship goals she once wrote with trembling hope.
She rebuilds the dashboard from scratch — soft pastel colors, minimalist layout, no shadows of the past clinging to the corners.
No templates. No borrowed structure. Just blank space and possibility.
Her hands tremble slightly as she types the first word: Begin.
As she scrolls through the workspace settings, she stumbles upon a button she hadn’t noticed before. Labeled:
“Start Fresh.”
A strange pulse runs through her chest. She hovers over it, then clicks.
For a split second — a flicker. Like a glitch in reality. The screen goes black. Then white. Then everything returns… normal.
But something shifts in the air. Subtle. Unseen.
She shakes her head. Probably just lag from the internet café downstairs. Still, a chill runs down her spine.
She closes the tab. Ignores it. Pretends nothing happened.
Because if there’s one thing she can’t afford right now, it’s mystery.
Night falls quickly in Mumbai during the rains. The sound of water tapping on the balcony door becomes a lullaby.
Manasi sits cross-legged on the floor, wrapped in a shawl she stole from her ex’s closet. She tells herself she’ll return it someday. Lies.
Her eyes feel heavy. Her body, tired. But her mind?
It’s finally quiet.
This isn’t healing. Not yet.
But it’s the first step.
She whispers into the darkness:
“No more drafts. No more rewriting the same story.”
And outside, the rain keeps falling — not as punishment this time, but as a promise.
The next morning, the rain has turned to a soft drizzle, as if Mumbai is catching its breath. Manasi, still wrapped in yesterday’s shawl, sips her chai and opens her laptop.
The pastel dashboard welcomes her like a friend—until it doesn’t.
A new page stares at her:
“You still cry in traffic, don’t you?”
Her fingers freeze.
That phrase. It’s from a voice note she once sent herself — late at night, after a fight with him, while stuck in an Uber crawling through Delhi’s choked roads. She never transcribed it. Never saved it. But there it was, typed out like a confession.
She slams the laptop shut.
It’s not possible.
But by evening, curiosity wins over fear.
She opens the page.
Inside, it’s not just the title. There are details — exact moments she thought only lived in her memory. The smell of the car’s air freshener that night. The song playing on the radio. How she wiped her tears with the sleeve of her grey sweater before the driver could glance back.
She gasps. Her hands shake.
This isn’t a glitch.
This is her.
Every page that appears feels like a mirror cracking open:
“The scarf you left on the train.”
“Why did you ghost Riya?”
“Don’t lie — you still cry in traffic.”
And then one more:
“Apologize to yourself.”
No date. No author. Just those words, bold and bleeding into her chest.
She tries everything — logging out, reinstalling Notion, wiping the workspace clean. But each time, the pages return. Like ghosts insisting on being heard.
But the worst part is every night now, she dreams.
Of the scarf tangled in someone else’s suitcase.
Of Riya’s unanswered texts.
Of red lights and silent horns and tears, she swore she’d stopped shedding.
She’s no longer sure what frightens her more — that these pages exist…
or that they feel like home.
For the first time in years, she feels... seen.
The title of the page hits harder than the others. Not clever. Not metaphor. Just… truth.
“The night you stopped believing in love.”
Manasi doesn’t open it for hours. It sits there like a wound she knows will reopen if she looks too closely.
She avoids it — scrolls past, opens new tabs, pretends to focus on work. But the title pulses at the edge of her vision, like a bruise begging to be pressed.
When she finally does click, the screen flickers — black, then white — like a shutter snapping open.
And then she’s there.
It wasn’t dramatic. No shouting. No slamming doors. Just silence, and the way he looked at her—not with anger, but indifference—when she told him about her dream of starting her own creative studio.
“You think people just let someone like you run something like that?”
“Someone like me?”
“You know what I mean. You’re talented, but… It’s not realistic.”
Her chest had caved in slowly after that. Not all at once, but piece by piece. Like a building hollowed out from the inside.
She remembered sitting alone in the bathroom later that night, staring at her reflection, asking herself if maybe he was right. If maybe she was trying too hard. Dreaming too loud.
That was the night.
Not when he left. Not when he cheated. Not when he ghosted her texts.
No.
It was that quiet, invisible moment — when she stopped believing that love would lift her up instead of hold her down.
Tears blur the screen now as she reads the words already written on the page — words she didn’t type.
“He didn’t break your heart.
He broke your trust in yourself.”
She should close it. She wants to.
Instead, she moves the cursor beneath the line and types:
“You didn’t get to define me.”
A pause.
Then, without warning, another comment appears — not hers.
“But someone else did.”
Manasi gasps.
The rain outside begins again — heavier this time.
Like something is waking up.
The rain has stopped.
Mumbai breathes again — steam rising from the streets, the city humming with a rhythm Manasi now hears in her bones.
She hasn’t left her apartment in two days.
Work messages pile up unread. Her phone buzzes like a trapped insect on the windowsill. She ignores it all.
Only the laptop remains open, glowing like a lantern in the dark of her mind.
Today, she opens a page she’s avoided for too long:
“You Stopped Dreaming at 29.”
This time, there’s no flicker. No glitch. Just the quiet weight of truth.
Inside, the page is blank.
And somehow, that feels like mercy.
She stares at it for hours. Not out of fear. Not out of panic. But because for the first time, she realizes what’s been missing wasn’t love, or closure, or even him.
It was her.
The version of herself who used to dream without apology. Who wrote poems on napkins and believed in magic even when life didn’t.
That girl had vanished somewhere between heartbreaks and deadlines.
And Manasi hadn’t even noticed she was gone.
Until now.
Tears fall before she can stop them — hot, heavy, long-overdue.
Her fingers find the keyboard.
Not to delete.
Not to hide.
But to write.
“I stopped dreaming because I stopped believing in myself.
Because someone taught me that my voice was too loud, my hope too bright, my pain too inconvenient.
I buried parts of me so deep I forgot how to dig them up.
But here I am.
Still broken. Still scared.
But still here.”
“And maybe that’s enough.”
“I forgive me.”
The cursor blinks after the last line, like a heartbeat finding its rhythm again.
Outside, the city moves forward.
Inside, so does she.
The next morning, Manasi wakes up before the rain begins.
She feels different—not healed, not entirely. But willing.
Willing to try again.
She opens her laptop and, for the first time in days, doesn’t dread the screen.
Instead, she creates a new page:
“What I Want to Remember.”
It’s quiet at first — just a blank canvas waiting for honesty. She hesitates, then reaches into the Trash folder. Into the Drafts that wouldn’t die.
One by one, she pulls out fragments of her past—not the pain, but the truth beneath it.
“He didn’t break your heart. He broke your trust in yourself.”
“You still cry in traffic, don’t you?”
“Apologize to yourself.”
She pastes them gently, like preserving pages from a diary someone tried to burn.
Then she starts writing — not to forget, but to honor.
She tells the story of the scarf left behind on a train. Of the friend she ghosted. Of the night she stopped dreaming, and how she found her way back.
And finally, she adds a new section:
“Past Lessons” — beside — “Future Plans.”
As she saves the page, something shifts.
The glitches stop.
No flickers. No unexpected pages. No haunting messages typed in real time.
The Notion dashboard remains still. Peaceful.
Like the storm had never come at all.
Manasi steps into the co-working space with a deep breath.
Not for a job interview. Not to impress.
But because she wants to be here.
She scans the room until she spots Riya.
Her old friend waves, eyes lighting up with surprise and something softer — relief, maybe.
They talk like no time has passed. Or maybe, like all the time in the world had to pass before this moment could happen.
Manasi speaks differently now — not louder, but clearer. More sure of where her voice belongs.
Later, over coffee, Riya asks, “So what are you working on these days?”
Manasi smiles.
“I’m writing again,” she says.
“And I’ve been helping people organize their digital messes.
Turns out, rebuilding someone else’s system is easier when you finally stop running from your own.”
Riya raises an eyebrow. “You’re basically a life coach now?”
Manasi laughs — a real one this time.
“No,” she says.
“Just someone who finally made peace with her past… and her dashboard.”
The rain returns — soft, rhythmic, familiar.
Manasi sits by the window, laptop open on her lap. The Notion dashboard glows gently in the dim room.
No ghosts hiding in the pages now. Just her words. Her truth.
Her story, finally told on her terms.
She opens the last page she’ll write tonight.
Just two sentences:
“Not everything old must be deleted.
Some drafts just need to be read.”
She pauses, then closes the laptop with a quiet click.
No more hiding. No more erasing herself to feel safe.
Outside, Mumbai hums under the monsoon sky — alive, relentless, beautiful.
Inside, Manasi smiles.
For the first time in a long time, she’s not running from the rain.
She’s dancing in it.
React
