They had fallen in love back in kindergarten, went through primary school together, then high school, and when adulthood struck—they married right away. They had been destined for each other since childhood. Everyone saw it, everyone had to admit it. They promised that their love would last “beyond the grave.” Friends waved it off, parents smiled. And yet those were words they spoke with all seriousness—as a seal that could never be broken.
But proud words about death seemed to draw death closer. When Anna suddenly and unexpectedly died, at the age of only twenty-two, from causes too obscure to explain, Jan’s world collapsed.
Suddenly he felt he had been left utterly alone. It seemed to him as if half of his heart was gone. Yet this state did not last long. Soon he realized that the silence in his house was not empty. On the very first evening after the funeral, he felt a hand rest on his shoulder—not heavy, more like a breeze, but infinitely familiar. The next day he found a folded scrap of paper on his pillow, which dissolved in his hand, with the words she alone used to say. “From twilight’s hush to morning’s light, and through the waking day, our love keeps burning brightly, a fire that will not sway.”
At first he thought it was a trick of the mind, a desperate wish to see her where she no longer was. But the touches did not stop. When he woke at night, he heard her breath. When he fell asleep, he felt the blanket on the other side of the bed rise ever so slightly. And one morning, when he opened his eyes, he saw a heart drawn on the misted windowpane.
Love, he understood, does not die. It only changes clothes—sometimes into silence, sometimes into cold, sometimes into a sudden flash of light in a darkened room. Sometimes into a presence you can’t prove to anyone, but you also can’t deny.
Jan stopped speaking of death as an end. He began to see it more as a boundary they had crossed together. He had promised not to leave her—and she, though on the other side, had kept that promise too.
And so they lived on: he in the house, she in the echo; he in time, she in his shadow. Bound not by flesh, but by a vow that even the grave could not break.
