Can We Be Strangers Again

“Ren, will you remember me?”

The girl held his hand as they walked along a quiet road. The sky stretched endlessly above them, and the world seemed to exist for no one but the two of them. Ren didn’t know where they were. He didn’t know who she was, either. Yet walking beside her felt more natural than anything he had ever known.

He tried to look at her face, but something always kept it just out of reach. He could hear her voice, feel the warmth of her hand, sense the smile she wore, but her features stayed frustratingly blurred.

“Ren, will you remember me?” she asked again.

He looked at her. “What do you mean? Of course I—”

The words died on his tongue.

Something was changing. The road ahead grew distant, the world blurred at its edges, and a strange weight settled in his chest. He tightened his grip on her hand, suddenly afraid that if he let go, something important would be lost forever.

“Wait,” he said. “Who are you?”

She didn’t answer.

“Hey! I’m talking to you!”

Her fingers began to slip from his.

“Wait—!”

Ren woke up.

He stared at the ceiling, breathing a little faster than usual. For several seconds, he didn’t move, as if some part of him were still waiting for her answer. But his bedroom was quiet, the dream was already fading, and the girl’s face had vanished from his memory once again.

He remembered her voice. He remembered the warmth of her hand. He even remembered the weight in his chest when she began to slip away.

But her face? Nothing.

“Seriously?” he muttered, rubbing his eyes. “Again?”

He turned towards the window. Rain streaked the glass, blurring the buildings outside into grey shapes. Water trickled from the roof, and the steady patter filled the silence of the apartment—a silence that had grown heavier since his mother went into the hospital.

Ren let his head fall back against the pillow.

Why do I keep having that dream? And why does it always rain whenever I dream about that girl?

The dreams had been visiting him for years, several times a week and without warning. Sometimes he forgot them almost completely, only to wake with that same voice lingering at the back of his mind.

And the rain was always waiting.

He had tried ignoring the coincidence. He had tried finding a logical explanation. He had even convinced himself that he remembered the rainy mornings more clearly because of the dreams. None of those explanations felt entirely right, but he had no evidence for anything else.

He glanced at the clock and bolted upright.

“Oh, come on! I’m going to be late!”

Whatever his dreams were trying to tell him could wait. School couldn’t.

He changed in front of the mirror on his wardrobe door, as he did every morning. He was pulling his shirt into place when his eyes found his upper arm in the glass.

He stopped.

There it was.

A small, round hole in the skin of his bicep.

It wasn’t a wound. There was no blood, and it didn’t hurt. Its edges weren’t torn or ragged. They were soft and faded, as though someone were slowly rubbing out a drawing. It was simply an absence—a place where there should have been something and wasn’t.

He couldn’t remember how it had started. He only knew that it had been there for years, and that it was getting bigger.

Very slowly.

Slowly enough that someone seeing it for the first time might not notice. Slowly enough that Ren sometimes wondered whether he was imagining the change.

But he wasn’t.

Every morning, he checked it, hoping the growth had stopped. Every morning, he found himself looking at it with the same unspoken question.

Why me?

He pressed a finger against the skin beside it. Nothing. No pain, no tingling, no clue about why a part of his own body seemed to be disappearing.

For a moment, he considered telling someone.

Then he pulled his sleeve down.

His father had passed away years ago, and his mother was in the hospital. He couldn’t give her another reason to worry, especially when he couldn’t even explain what was wrong. What would he say? That a hole had been growing in his arm for years and he had no idea why?

She would ask questions. Doctors would examine it. Everyone would want answers.

And what if there weren’t any?

“It’s fine,” he murmured.

He looked away from the mirror before he could change his mind.

A few minutes later, he grabbed his umbrella and the novel he had been reading, slipped on his shoes, and stepped outside.

The cool air brushed his face. Rain fell steadily over the street, gathering in shallow puddles along the pavement. He opened his umbrella and started towards school, tucking the book beneath its shelter.

Whenever Ren couldn’t solve a problem, he had a habit of finding a smaller, sillier one to be annoyed at instead. Today, it was the weather.

“Seriously, does it ever stop raining here?” he grumbled, watching water slide from the edge of his umbrella. “Has the sun resigned or something?”

For the past seven years, rain had been such a regular part of his life that a completely dry day almost felt unusual. He glanced up, but the clouds offered no explanation. Naturally.

Reading while walking wasn’t a sensible habit, but Ren had been doing it for so long that he considered himself an expert. He opened the novel, found his place, and turned a page.

A sentence made him slow down.

The person you love always somehow comes into your dreams.

He read it once, then again, and then, for reasons he couldn’t explain, a third time.

“Hah? Who writes this stuff?” he muttered. “It’s so cheesy. And I don’t even know her.”

The last words came out quieter than the rest.

A small smile crept across his face before he could stop it. He was standing in the rain, arguing with a book about a girl whose face he couldn’t remember.

He closed the novel and walked on. The author was just trying to make things sound romantic. That was all. It didn’t mean anything.

His thoughts drifted towards school and his classmates, who seemed to pair off as if it were a requirement. Someone was always talking about a crush, someone else was teasing a friend about their partner, and there were couples who made every ordinary school day look like a scene from a romance drama.

And then there was Ren.

Single. Unbothered. Entirely uninterested.

That was the official statement, anyway.

How is almost everyone in my class paired up? Is there some kind of relationship application I forgot to submit?

He stopped walking.

“WHY AM I THINKING ABOUT THIS?” he blurted out.

A passer-by glanced at him. Ren immediately turned away and became deeply interested in the pavement.

“I don’t need anyone,” he muttered. “Calm down, Ren. Calm down.”

He adjusted his umbrella and walked on, hoping the world would forget he had just shouted at his own thoughts.

A few moments later, another thought occurred to him.

“By the way, what’s the time?”

He shifted the umbrella to one hand and pulled out his phone. As he checked the screen, a girl passed him in the opposite direction beneath a clear umbrella beaded with rain.

Ren barely noticed her.

Not at first.

Then a scent reached him through the damp air, faint and delicate, gone almost as soon as he noticed it. It felt strangely familiar, though he was certain he had never smelled it before.

His thumb stopped moving against the screen.

He lifted his head.

The girl was already several steps away. Ren turned to look at her, but all he could see was her back and the glint of rain on her umbrella. There was nothing extraordinary about her. She was just someone walking to wherever she needed to be, as he was.

So why did he feel as though he had just passed something important?

Wait. Why am I staring at a random girl?

He turned back, shoved his phone into his pocket, and tightened his grip on the novel.

You’re obsessed, Ren. STOP OVERTHINKING.

He nearly laughed at himself. First, he was dreaming about a girl he didn’t know. Then he was smiling at romantic sentences like an idiot. Now he was turning around to stare at strangers because one of them smelled familiar.

“Nope,” he whispered. “Absolutely not. I’m perfectly normal.”

He straightened his shoulders and resumed walking. The girl was a stranger. The scent was probably familiar from somewhere else. His brain had simply decided that an ordinary rainy morning was the perfect time to embarrass him.

He didn’t look back.

Several steps behind him, the girl stopped walking.

She stood beneath her umbrella, watching him leave. The rain tapped against the fabric above her head, but she seemed not to notice. Something about the boy had caught her attention, something she couldn’t quite put into words.

Ren continued towards school, completely unaware that he was being watched.

For him, she was a stranger he had no reason to remember.

For her, he was someone she couldn’t quite ignore.

Neither of them knew why.

The girl finally turned away, and they continued in opposite directions, swallowed by the grey morning.

The rain continued to fall.