The Girl Who Remembered Too Much

Lina was only seven when she started remembering things that never happened to her.

She would wake in the middle of the night crying for a man she didn’t know. She’d speak of places she’d never visited — deserts with blue sand, oceans that sang, cities made of glass. Her parents thought she had an overactive imagination. “Dreams,” they said. “She’s just sensitive.”

But Lina knew they weren’t dreams. They were memories. Old ones.

Some were gentle — a mother humming beneath a purple sky, the scent of firewood and spices. Others were sharp — battles, betrayal, drowning in silence.

At age nine, she refused to walk near the town’s river. “There’s someone buried under the water,” she said calmly. “She sings to me at night.”

By twelve, the voices started.

Not voices that spoke to her — but voices from her. Feelings she couldn’t explain. Wisdom that slipped from her mouth like water, stunning the adults around her.

“Where did you hear that?” her teacher once asked, after Lina spoke about the pain of invisible wounds.

Lina shrugged. “I didn’t. It was just inside me.”

She didn’t have friends. Children whispered behind her back, calling her strange. A few adults said she had “an old soul.” Others thought something was wrong with her.

She began to withdraw — not out of fear, but because she was tired of explaining things no one believed.

By sixteen, she’d stopped talking about her memories entirely.

But they didn’t stop talking to her.

---

One evening, Lina found herself drawn to the edge of the forest near her village. She had passed it a thousand times but never entered. That day, though, she felt something pull her — soft, magnetic, and familiar.

She followed the pull.

The deeper she went, the quieter the world became. No birds. No wind. Just breath. Her own, and something else… older.

Then she saw it.

A tree — ancient, massive, with bark that shimmered like obsidian and roots that pulsed faintly like veins.

She approached, and as her fingers touched the bark, she heard it — her voice, but from another time.

"You left part of yourself here."

A memory surged: she was barefoot, wrapped in gold cloth, pressing her hand to this very tree. Her name was different. Her body was different. But the soul — it was hers.

And then she remembered everything.

---

She had lived before. Many times.

As healer. Warrior. Wanderer. Poet. Monk. Thief. She had loved deeply, lost painfully, died often. Each life leaving behind echoes.

And now, for reasons she didn’t fully understand, those echoes were waking.

Not just in her, but in others too.

She began to notice signs — people slipping into deep sadness for no reason, children drawing places they’d never seen, strangers looking into her eyes like they knew her.

Something was shifting.

The world was remembering itself — not just forward, but backward. Sideways. Inward.

And Lina, for reasons still hidden in the silence, was part of it.

---

So she began to write.

Not just for herself — but for them.

For the girl in the city who feared the ocean but didn’t know why.

For the man who felt grief every full moon.

For the grandmother who dreamed of burning temples.

For the thousands carrying unspoken stories in their bones.

She wrote with ink, with voice, with presence. And when people read her words, they didn’t understand them with their minds. They felt them in their souls.

They remembered.

---

One day, an old woman visited her, unannounced, wearing a pendant carved like the tree from the forest.

“I’ve waited a long time to find you,” she said.

Lina said nothing.

The woman smiled. “You’re not broken. You’re open. And now, so is the world.”