The screen flickered to life in a dimly lit room. The faint sound of static and the hum of an amplifier crackling to life broke the silence.
A soft, rhythmic tapping started, similar to a heartbeat, followed by the faint strum of guitar strings. The dim light of a single bulb illuminated the scene.
A hand appeared in the frame. Thin, trembling with a faint tremor, it adjusted the strings. The hand bore a long scar that ran from the base of the thumb up to the wrist, jagged and pale against this musician's skin.
The scar seemed to tell a story all on its own, a mark of pain and resilience etched into his very being, a reminder that some wounds neverhands,. The camera refused to show more than this hand and guitar, as if hiding from the rest of the world in plain sight.
No face was visible. The camera stayed close, focusing on the guitar and the hands that were about to play it, as though the music itself was the only thing that truly mattered.
The melody began, each note hanging in the air like an echo. The strumming grew louder, more deliberate, as a haunting melody began to take its shape. And then, the voice sang:
"Hello there, my shadowed friend; you lingered in my mind.
In this dance of life and death, you've left me intertwined.
The echoes of your whispers claw deep into my soul.
A symphony of heartache in the silence takes its toll."
"I thought I knew who i was before the weight of time began,
But now the mirror's cracked, and all I see is someone I can't understand."
"I walk through life like a ghost; nothing ever feels the same.
I try to run, but I'm pulled back to the same damn pain."
"You tell me to keep fighting, but my body's worn and weak,
Every breath a hollow ache, every word too hard to speak.
What's the purpose of a journey that always ends the same?
What's the meaning of survival if I'm drowning in the same damn pain?"
"Maybe in this song, I'll find the truth I've buried,
Or maybe it's just silence where my sorrow's forced to stay."
"But maybe there's a reason in this broken, fleeting tune,
A flicker in the darkness, a flower in the ruin.
If I can sing my sorrow, let it echo through the void.
Perhaps the weight of this regret can someday be destroyed."
"But what's the point of fighting when I'm just a shadow of who I was?
What's the point of trying when the end is never close enough?"
And then, everything stopped. The guitar fell silent, the screen blank for a heartbeat. The musician was tired; the hands that had been so steady moments ago now hung limp beside them. In the silence, the weight of years seemed to press down on the musician. The screen flickered once more before cutting to black due to no use. The musician lifted his hand, placed it on the mouse, and shook it, making the computer come back alive again.
The musician was Roy Shyam, not our Roy Shyam but this universe's one. He clicked 'upload' with his shaking hands, and then he leaned back in his chair, his chest tight with a mixture of relief and pain. The song's title was 'The Last Song", which was just published now; his soul lay bare for the whole world to see.
For a moment, he stared at the scar on his hand, the one that never seemed to fade away. Tracing its jagged path with his index finger. It had been years since he'd gotten it, a stupid accident in the kitchen, or so he told himself.
But sometimes, he wondered if it meant something more, like a reminder.
The video started blowing up. Roy sat motionless, eyes barely registering the climbing numbers on the screen. A mixture of nervousness and exhaustion clung to him like a fog, but deeper than that, there was something else. A growing pressure to do good, like his mind was trying to split itself into two.
Comments began to roll in, a stream of kind words. He read them, but they felt like echoes in a room in which he wasn't in. They didn't feel real. None of this did. It wasn't that he didn't appreciate these kind words; it's just that they simply couldn't reach him. Not anymore.
Then the wave hit.
An overwhelming wave of pain slammed into him, not physical, but more disorienting. Like his nerves were firing in the wrong direction, as if his soul had been crammed into a container so small that it was about to burst out. He doubled over, clutching his chest as his racing heart slammed against his ribs, a foreign rhythm in a body that felt like a stranger's.
He remembered. He remembered it all.
Memories. Not dreams, not hallucinations, but actual memories override eyes like slamming him into a freight train.
His life before it all.
The space station. The black hole. The vacuum was tearing his body to ribbons. The endless scream he never got to finish.
The crushing weight of gravity as it folded time, space and him. His atoms stretched thin like a thread until they snapped. The darkness wasn't just dark; it was empty.
Roy gasped, clutching his chest, heart pounding so hard he thought it might burst.
Until it all immediately stopped.
He sucked in a sharp breath, the air tasting wrong, like plastic and blood and newness. His senses were on overload, and they were telling him that he wasn't supposed to be here.
"No," he choked out, his voice thin and cracking. His muscles trembled. His bones ached. His skin felt tight over his frame, like he hadn't fully grown accustomed to it yet or maybe like he had grown out of it long ago.
"No. Not again. I was supposed to be done."
He staggered to his desk, knocking over papers, headphones, anything in his path. His hands were shaking. These hands were shaking. They weren't his. Not the ones he remembered.
Not the ones that once held test papers that he did badly on in his original life, that once clutched a metal console in his previous life, that once reached for someone who could never come back. That once reached for an airlock door that was shut on him.
He violently opened the drawer in the desk, rummaging blindly until his fingers hit glass. A mirror.
But how did he know there was a mirror in there? He doesn't know how, but he just knew.
He yanked the mirror towards him.
He stared.
And the reflection made him catch his breath.
It was him. But not.
The face stared back in the reflection.
Roy looked over at the face. The face was paler than his, but the jawline was sharper than his, and the eye colour was slightly different, just enough to notice the change. His hair was styled differently again. As Roy took his hand up to his face to feel it, he noticed the scar on his hand. It was not his.
Who the hell was this Roy?
He leaned closer to the mirror, almost pleading with it. His voice broke into a whisper, "Who … am I?"
Every cell in his body screamed with displacement, like his soul had been stapled into someone else's skin.
The more he looked, the more alien he felt.
And yet, somehow, he knew this body, its habits, its scars, its memories; they were all accessible to him, like a book he'd already read but never lived.
Our Roy's memories were still there too, etched deep, refusing to be silenced. They overlapped with this new life, layered like ghosts behind his eyes.
He knew everything this version of him had done, every friend he'd had, every lie he'd told, every late night strumming a guitar and whispering made-up lyrics into the dark night. And yet none of it felt like it was his.
He tried to move, but even that felt off.
His limbs were out of sync, like he had to relearn how to live and exist.
His sense of self was scattered across realities. An average high schooler who died in an alleyway screaming, an unlucky astronaut who had been ripped apart by a cosmic force, and now… a musician with calloused fingers and a quiet room full of someone else's memories.
Three lives. Three deaths.
Each one peeled another layer of who he thought he was, and now, he was just an echo of who he really was.
He leaned in closer to the mirror, as if it could tell him something. Anything. But all it did was reflect a man who no longer remembered the shape of his own face.
But still, questions clawed at him:
What does it mean to live when the life you wake up in isn't yours?
What does it mean to fight for tomorrow when tomorrow never remembers today?
What does it mean to keep going… when every part of me screams that you shouldn't exist at all?
Tears welled up in Roy's eyes; he didn't let them fall, because if he started crying now… he didn't know if he'd ever stop.
Roy started to think for himself; he wanted to bargain – bargain for anything, anything to get back to normal. He would have done anything to get back to the moment he left school. He would have done anything to get back onto the main road like Kieran told him to.
But there was nothing he could do, as he didn't have the slightest clue as to anything.
The silence in the room pressed down on Roy, thick and suffocating. He barely noticed the soft padding of footsteps from the hallway until the door creaked open.
Even though his mind was still trapped in the storm of his memories, those other lives bled together like a blur.
"Roy?" A gentle voice called out from behind, breaking the silence. "Are you alright?"
Roy recognised this voice immediately; the way it spoke was also familiar yet weirdly distant.
Roy froze, his gaze still locked on the reflection in the mirror. He puts down the mirror on the desk, not looking back.
He didn't know what to say or what to feel in that moment. The stranger he knows from childhood – no, since birth – seemed so far, yet so close.
The last time he saw this stranger was the morning before he left for school.
It was Amma, the Amma that he was meant to go home to in his original life. No, this was not his Amma; it was this body's Amma.
His mother's voice pierced the fog of his thoughts again, softer yet sharp, with concern. "Breakfast is ready, beta. You need to eat before you head to school."
Roy blinked, pulling himself out of his daze. He rubbed his eyes, trying to shake off the tears and the weight of hearing his… Their Amma's voice. His chest still ached, his heart still raced, but he didn't want to burden his… Their Amma with any of it.
He couldn't look back.
"Yeah," he whispered, his voice cracking slightly. "I'm fine."
His mother hesitated for a moment, then entered the room fully. She stood by the door, watching him carefully, Roy feeling her eyes darting around the messy room and then back at him.
"If you need to talk, I'm here; you know, right, beta?"
Roy nodded, though he didn't know if that was true. It was hard to explain what he was feeling – or if there was even anything to explain. Maybe it was better to pretend, to say nothing and go on like everything was normal, like how this body's Roy had been doing for years.
"I'll be down in a minute," Roy said, forcing a weak smile as he turned around, looking anything but their mother's eyes. This smile of his felt more like a mask than anything genuine.
It was disgusting.
Amma didn't push further; if this was a few years ago, she would have, but now she didn't have the strength to do it anymore. Instead, she pressed her lips into a thin line and said, "Mhmm," turning away to leave the room.
The door clicked softly behind her, and for a moment, Roy was left alone again with his thoughts as the fog came back.
He stood there, raising the mirror again and staring at the reflection, questions swirling and the pain of acting, lying and being deceitful clawing at his insides.
His hands trembled as he retraced the scar on his wrist again, the jagged reminder of everything that had come before.
"Maybe in this life," he whispered to the empty room, "I'll find some sort of an answer."
With a heavy sigh, he forced himself to move, walking out of the room and heading downstairs, the familiar scent of breakfast in the air. It was the same as everything else, yet still different as always.