The Event that Stayed

Everything was so normal. At least that is what I remember. Funny, how you believe an event is so horrible at the time, but it fades away into the past. It’s the events that make you numb that stay with you. Even follow you.

I used to think the worst thing that ever happened to me was the night Daniel left. He slammed the door hard enough to shake the picture frames, and I sat there, shaking myself, trying to decide whether to run after him or to collapse. I remember thinking, this is it. This is the bottom. I’ll never be the same after this.

But people exaggerate their own heartbreak. Or maybe time just shrinks it down. These days, I can barely recall the sound of his voice, only the outline of his shoulders disappearing into the dark. When I think of it now, I don’t feel devastation — I feel embarrassed. Embarrassed that I believed losing him was the end of the world, when it was just a cracked plate in the kitchen cupboard of my life. Something you notice for a while, and then learn to eat from anyway.

What I didn’t know then, what I couldn’t know, was that the real bottom was still waiting.

It came quietly, the way most things do. There was no dramatic slam of a door, no raised voices. Just a Tuesday night, cold and wet, the kind of rain that looks silver under the street lamps.

I had been walking home from the bus stop. Nothing unusual in that. The sidewalks glistened, and every car that passed sprayed my shoes with dirty water. I remember thinking about groceries — whether I had enough milk for the morning, whether I should stop at the corner store. It’s strange how your brain anchors itself to useless details, like you’re trying to trick yourself into believing it’s just another day.

Then I heard the scream.

At first, I didn’t even realize it was human. It was high and raw, scraping through the rain like something tearing. I stopped under a streetlight, squinting into the dark. Across the street, where the alley cuts between the laundromat and the old brick apartments, I saw movement. A shape. Two shapes.

I should have kept walking. My whole body told me to — my legs trembled with the urge to run. But I stepped closer instead. Maybe it was curiosity. Maybe it was stupidity. Maybe it was that old, dangerous instinct to help.

By the time I reached the mouth of the alley, the screaming had stopped. What I saw there has never stopped.

It wasn’t the blood, though there was plenty of it. It wasn’t even the body on the ground, twisted in a way a body shouldn’t twist. It was the face of the person standing over them. The way they turned and looked at me.

There are moments in life when you’re not sure if something is real. Like waking from a dream but still hearing the echo of it. That look — that flat, unbothered gaze — froze me in place. I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream, couldn’t even blink. The rain hissed in the gutters, and the city kept going, but everything else stopped.

And then, just like that, they walked away. Past me. Brushed my shoulder as though we were strangers passing on the sidewalk. No rush. No fear. Just… gone.

I don’t know how long I stood there, staring at what they left behind. Long enough for the sirens to arrive. Long enough for someone else — not me — to call them.

The police asked questions, of course. I answered as best I could. Male or female? Tall or short? Did I see a weapon? What color was the jacket? What did their voice sound like?

I had nothing. Or rather, I had too much. My brain had burned the image so deeply into me that it distorted every attempt to describe it. Their face was both vivid and impossible: sharp angles I can’t name, a mouth that might have smirked or might not have. Eyes that were either black or blue or brown. How can you tell someone that the only thing you truly remember is the feeling — the crushing, cold certainty that the person who looked at you would never, ever leave your head?

The police didn’t say it, but I saw it in their eyes. Witness, unreliable. Traumatized, confused. They had other leads, anyway. Other people to question. I was just the unlucky bystander.

But I didn’t feel unlucky. I felt… marked.

That was three years ago. Daniel is long gone, off in another city, probably with another woman. I don’t think about him anymore. But I think about that alley every day.

I moved apartments. Changed jobs. Deleted social media. All those things people say help when you’ve been through something. But it’s still there. In the quiet moments. In the sound of rain against the window. In the way strangers’ faces blur together on the bus, each one of them possibly them.

It’s not fear, not exactly. Fear would mean adrenaline, panic, some chance at escape. This is different. This is numbness. A hollowed-out place where the scream used to live. I don’t cry about it. I don’t talk about it. I just carry it.

And sometimes, I wonder if that was the point.

Because here’s the part I never told the police. The part I’ve never told anyone.

When they brushed past me in that alley, when their shoulder touched mine, they whispered something. Just one word. So quiet I thought I’d imagined it.

“Remember.”

I do. God help me, I do.

And I think that’s why it follows me. Why I can’t let it fade like Daniel, like all the other so-called tragedies of my life. It wasn’t just a word. It was an order. A command sewn into my bones.

Remember.

Sometimes I wonder if they’ll come back. If that was the beginning, not the end. Some nights I even think I see them — in the corner of a shop window, in the shape of a shadow slipping down another street.

And when I close my eyes, I see their face. Not the details — those never stay right — but the feeling of it. Cold, certain, inevitable.

People like to say time heals all wounds. They’ve never carried a wound like this. Time doesn’t heal it. It burrows, it spreads, it takes root until it becomes part of you.

Everything was so normal, once. That’s what I remember. But now normal feels like the lie, and the numbness feels like the truth.

The event didn’t just happen. It chose me.

And I remember.