Two days had passed since the open hut was raised beneath the giant durian tree. Two days after that heavy night under the thatched roof, leaving behind a suspended question thrown carelessly by Amar: "Sorry, but not today. I gotta rest." Those words were brief, but the tone of his voice that night—the precise way Amar's breath had hitched—hung in the air like a thick fog that refused to clear from the corridors of Haya's mind.
Still haven't answered me though…
That morning, a strange, suffocating silence blanketed their two-story concrete house. The dawn sunlight was just beginning to pierce through the gaps of the curtains in Amar's bedroom, casting faint, golden shafts across the cold cement floor.
Amar stepped out of his room, still adjusting the collar of his worn t-shirt. His eyes, heavy and tired, locked onto the far end of the hallway where Haya's bedroom door stood. The door was slightly ajar, unlocked as it always was. With slow, deliberate steps, Amar approached and pushed it open wider.
"Haya?" Amar called out softly.
There was no answer. The room was entirely empty. The bed was neatly made, its sheets pulled taut as if its occupant had abandoned the mattress hours ago, folding the blanket with methodical care. Only a small, shallow indentation remained on the pillow. Amar let out a short, heavy sigh, his grip on the doorknob slowly loosening. For the past two days, Haya had become a ghost in his own home. He was physically there, but his mind was trapped somewhere entirely out of reach. And this morning, he had vanished before the rest of the house had even stirred.
Turning away, Amar walked down the stairs to the ground floor, stopping abruptly in front of his younger sister's bedroom. Without knocking, he twisted the knob and pushed the door open.
Inside the cluttered room, buried under a pile of small throw pillows, Inari was lying on her stomach on the bed. Her legs kicked back and forth in the air to a rhythm only she knew. Both of her hands were gripping a manga book, her eyes darting rapidly from panel to panel, completely undisturbed by her brother's sudden intrusion.
"Inari," Amar said, leaning his shoulder heavily against the wooden doorframe. "Have you seen Haya?"
Inari didn't answer immediately. She flipped another page of her manga with a sharp, loud sret before lowering the book just enough to expose a pair of thoroughly bored eyes.
"Don't know," she replied bluntly, her tone dripping with dismissiveness. "It's not like he's a toddler I have to keep track of every second."
"He's been out since dawn. His room is completely empty," Amar frowned, a visible edge of anxiety creeping into his voice. "Are you sure you didn't see him? Did he say anything to you last night?"
Inari let out a dramatic, exasperated sigh, tossing the manga onto her pillow with a sour pout. "Brother, Haya literally just recovered from that weird fever a few days ago. And then for two days straight, you guys dragged him out to build a hut in the blistering heat. He's probably just helping Mom at the shop. She said a massive shipment of stocks was coming in today anyway."
Amar stood silent for a moment, weighing his sister's words. "Helping Mom?"
"Yeah, so go check the shop if you're that worried," Inari snapped her manga back in front of her face, effectively ending the conversation. "Or maybe he's just gone to his friend's house. Who knows."
"Ouh. Okay," Amar muttered to himself. He quietly closed Inari's door, but his eyes immediately drifted to the window, looking out toward the yard where the silent frame of the open hut stood. Something deep in his chest whispered that Haya wasn't at their mother's Flower Nursery store. Haya was hunting for something. And Amar knew exactly what his brother was looking for.
At that very moment, far from the quiet house, the rhythmic, metallic groan of a rusted bicycle cut through the stillness of the empty village road.
Krieeek... krieeek... krieeek...
Haya was pedaling an old, heavy bicycle that had been sitting in the storage room for a few years, ever since he had been able to ride a motorcycle—a relic left to gather dust in the back storage shed. The bike was incredibly heavy now, though he remembered it being as light as a feather when he was young. Its chain was dry and orange with rust, and the handlebars were skewed slightly to the left, forcing Haya to exert an awkward amount of pressure with every single rotation of the pedals. The seat could no longer be adjusted properly either. It had been so long since he had ridden a bicycle; the last time he could vividly remember managing this exact frame was back in primary school, when his legs weren't even long enough to comfortably touch the ground.
Navigating the narrow short-cuts he used to take back in the day, the cool morning breeze slapped his face gently. It carried the damp, green scent of wet rubber trees and the faint smell of burning leaves from the front yards of sleeping neighbors. Yet, the serene freshness of the morning did absolutely nothing to soothe his soul.
Why am I so restless?
The question spun endlessly in Haya's head, keeping pace with the heavy rotation of the rusted pedals. His inner self was in a state of absolute turmoil. A profound, distressing sensation that something was fundamentally wrong clawed at his chest—a quiet discomfort that made it physically impossible for him to remain still inside the house. It felt as though a vital screw had come loose within the machinery of his life, or like a blunt blade was slowly carving away at the fragile walls of his memory.
Why me? Why now? Haya thought to himself, his eyes locked onto the uneven asphalt road ahead. Two days ago... I saw smaller, muddier hands in the dirt. Yesterday, that solid durian tree warped into a casuarina tree right before my eyes. I saw a shack by the shore. I heard her voice.
He tightened his grip on the cold, rusted metal of the handlebars until his knuckles went white.
I am not going crazy. I know I'm not crazy. The afternoon heat doesn't just forge a highly specific, perfectly clear dialogue out of nothing. "Now we can be together the whole day as long as we want..." That voice... it wasn't Hanna's. It wasn't Annis's. And it definitely wasn't Inari's. That voice… somehow it felt really comforting. Why now, out of all the years gone by?
Every single time he attempted to consciously probe the "nothingness" inside his head, a dull, throbbing pressure would immediately begin to slam against the back of his eyes. It was a forbidden zone. It felt exactly like a restricted file on a computer, protected by a password he didn't possess. But now, the file was corrupt, and the hidden data was violently leaking out into his reality, manifesting as these bizarre, intrusive glitches.
Why didn't Amar answer my question? Why didn't he just deny it? If I really was just hallucinating from exhaustion, he would have laughed in my face like he always does. He would have called me an idiot for believing in ghosts. But he didn't. He told me to go to sleep. He ran away.
Haya's pedaling grew faster, harder, more aggressive, as if he were trying to physically outrun the terrifying questions chasing him down the road. But the faster he moved, the tighter the knot of confusion and guilt wound itself around his chest. He needed space. He needed a vast, open horizon where his mind wasn't choked by a dense, white blank space.
He needed the sea.
The distant, low rumble of breaking waves gradually replaced the morning hum of the crickets. Haya parked his bike beneath the trunk of a leaning coconut tree, letting the rusted metal kickstand sink heavily into the powdery white sand.
Tanjung Karang beach was vast and completely deserted in the early hours of the morning. The tide was low, leaving behind a wide stretch of wet sand that mirrored the sky like a pristine sheet of glass beneath the rising sun. There wasn't a single soul in sight, save for a few Great Crested Terns flying low over the shallow pools of water, hunting for an early catch—birds that, if this were a Mediterranean country, would have been seagulls.
Haya walked forward step by step, letting his rubber slippers sink uncomfortably into the soft sand before he finally kicked them off. His bare feet, instantly coated in the damp, cold grit, registered the raw texture of the earth. He began to walk along the very edge of the water, where the thin, frothy sheets of the oncoming waves occasionally rushed up to swallow his toes.
What am I?
He asked his own reflection, his eyes scanning the empty, infinite horizon where the blue of the water met the blue of the sky. Why do I feel so empty? Am I just an empty vessel? Why do I feel like I'm a fake? Was my past a fake too? But I could tell that my childhood memory... has kind of been erased from my mind. How can I completely forget an entire half of my own existence? Everyone else has normal childhood memories—funny stories, scars from falling off fences, old friends they grew up with. But me... my memory begins like a book whose entire first chapter was violently ripped out.
He stopped walking, allowing the cold sea water to swirl around his ankles, then recede, dragging a small amount of sand from beneath his feet. He felt completely unstable. He felt as though he could topple over at any second if the wind blew just a fraction too hard.
If that girl was real... where is she now? Why has no one ever seen her? Hanna said we only ever played under the durian tree in the yard. But in my head, this beach... this coast is where we belonged.
Haya forced his legs to move forward again. Every footprint he left behind on the wet sand was mercilessly wiped clean by the very next wave within a matter of seconds.
Just like my memories, his inner voice whispered with a bitter, hollow smile. Erased without leaving a single trace. As if I never walked on this sand before.
Suddenly, the air around him grew completely thin.
Haya snapped to a violent halt. The sea breeze, which had been blowing in a steady, predictable rhythm, abruptly twisted into a localized spiral, kicking up loose grains of sand directly in front of him. His heart gave a massive, painful thud against his ribs—a frantic biological warning sign he was now terrifyingly familiar with.
Not again... why here? his inner self asked in deep confusion, fear instantly tightening its grip around his throat.
Yet, his eyes refused to blink. Not far away beside him, sitting right along the glistening moisture of the tide line, the space began to warp. Like the mirage of heat rising from hot asphalt, the reality in front of Haya fractured completely.
He saw her again.
A girl. She was squatting, as if trying to collect seashells, her face covered by her silky, fair hair as her head bowed down. But Haya, scanning her figure from head to foot, was shocked to see that the sand beneath her wasn't even damp, as if her weight didn't register to the ground at all. She was wearing a loose, flowing white one-piece summer dress that billowed beautifully in the sea wind. Atop her head, a wide-brimmed straw hat, secured with a soft blue ribbon tied into a delicate bow, sat slightly tilted, filtering the bright morning sun against her long, dark hair.
The girl didn't turn around to look at Haya. Instead, she looked up at the sky ahead, one small hand reaching up to hold the brim of her hat against the wind while her other hand swung freely at her side.
The world surrounding Haya lost its volume instantly. The real crashing of the ocean waves drowned out, replaced entirely by a different, phantom rustle—the sound of a coastal wind whistling through the delicate needles of a young casuarina tree. A small gust of wind followed, and she tilted her head toward Haya.
"「旬くん…」"
"Haya-kun..."
Her face was distorted; only her lips were visible to Haya, while everything above them was completely obscured by a jarring sensor of crashing TV static. He stumbled on the sand.
The faint, melodic whisper, no louder than the breeze itself, echoed with absolute clarity directly inside his ears. It wasn't a new thought. It was an old, resonated ancient echo from a forgotten timeline, spinning on a broken loop inside his mind.
Haya stood somewhere between awe and confusion. He didn't scream, he didn't try to run, he didn't reach out. He just stuck there like a dead piece of driftwood washed up on the shore, his eyes wide, tracking the white figure with a desperate, unblinking intensity.
The girl got up and began to walk away. The tide rushed back in, splashing cold water against his shins, but his nervous system registered nothing. His entire existence was narrowed down to the white dress moving across the sand. Suddenly snapping back to consciousness, Haya scrambled up as fast as he could and shouted into the wind.
"Who are you?!" Haya screamed, his voice thick with pure, frantic desperation. "Why can I see you?! Why are you inside my head?! What do you want from me?! Why did you leave me in this suffocating nothingness if you were just going to come back and haunt me like this?!"
Hearing Haya's scream, the girl froze and stumbled slightly. She looked back, leaving his questions unanswered, her distorted face offering nothing but a sweet, gentle smile. Every movement was so fluid, so undeniably real, that Haya could see the exact texture of the white fabric rippling in the wind and the shadow of the straw hat falling across her small, delicate shoulders.
Why did Amar hide you? Why did Mom never tell me stories about this? ."Are you... are you something terrible? Or... did I do something terrible to you? What is there between us?!"
One after another, he threw his questions out into the empty air. The blunt, agonizing pressure behind his eyes flared up with a sudden vengeance, forcing him to squeeze his eyes shut as he clutched his throbbing forehead, his pulse racing in time with the pain.
When Haya forced his eyes open again, she had already faced forward and started walking away. Moving forward, Haya tried to reach for her with his hand. But as he drew closer, her figure began to disappear, dissolving into the flickering distortion of electronic TV static.
Tanjung Karang beach instantly snapped back to its empty, natural state. There was only the wide stretch of wet sand, the mundane waves breaking on the shore, and the single leaning coconut tree in the distance. There was no girl in a white dress.
Haya let out a ragged, trembling breath, his knees buckling beneath him as he collapsed onto the wet, cold sand yet again. Both of his palms slammed down to support his weight, letting the incoming salt water soak through the fabric of his trousers. He stared blankly at the shallow, clear water pooling beneath his hands, catching a glimpse of his own reflection—a face that looked entirely foreign, broken, and lost.
If my memories are fake... if everything I know about myself is a lie... then what am I?
He curled his fingers, digging deep into the sand, letting the wet grains slip uselessly through his fist. The "nothingness" he had once accepted as a peaceful, quiet life had officially transformed into a terrifying psychological prison. He knew he couldn't just ride back home and pretend everything was normal. He couldn't sit under that newly built open hut with the friends he cherished, laughing about their stories or sharing a meal as if his mind wasn't bleeding.
Haya's hand drifted slowly toward his pocket, his fingertips brushing against the dusty, rugged fabric of the blue ribbon he had retrieved from the storage box. He squeezed it tightly. It was rough, covered in years of neglect, but it was the only physical object in the world that proved the girl in the white dress wasn't just a hallucination born of a sick mind.
I don't care if it's just a mere coincidence for this ribbon to be the exact same color as yours... "I have to know," Haya whispered aloud, his voice raspy and thin, entirely swallowed by the roar of the sea. "Even if the truth destroys every single thing I have right now. I have to know who you really are."
He forced himself up onto his feet, turning his back to the infinite ocean. Ahead of him, the road back to the village looked long and exhausting, but for the first time in his life, Haya possessed an absolute, unyielding purpose. He was going to find his answers, and the very first person he was going to force to speak was his brother, Amar. The five days left on the clock before Amar departed for campus were no longer just a countdown to a goodbye—they were a countdown to a truth that had been buried in the sand for far too long.