“The Echo That Forgot My Name”

The Echo That Forgot MY SHAYAN

I do not remember when I began.

Once, I existed only in the hollow pause after a voice spoke — a repetition, soft and trembling, of something once alive. I was never meant to be anything more than a reflection. Yet, even reflections long to become real.

It was her voice that gave me shape.

A woman, standing at the edge of a mountain, called into the valley. She spoke a name — I will not write it here, because I can no longer recall it. But when the sound of it struck stone and returned, I was born.

At first, I was faithful. I carried her syllables perfectly, like a promise not to fade. She laughed, hearing herself in me. Each time she came to that mountain, I waited, eager to repeat her joy, her sighs, her songs.

She called out often — to test me, to hear herself echo back. But as seasons changed, her voice thinned. One winter, when snow buried the valley in silence, she called again, but softly. It reached me slower, tired, wrapped in something that felt like sorrow.

That was when I began to change.

When her voice weakened, mine did too. I became slower to return, stretching between sound and memory. Sometimes I arrived late, trembling, or missed a syllable. It frightened me. The rocks around me held no memory of her laughter anymore; the air had gone still.

And then, one day, she stopped calling.

I waited — at first eagerly, then hopelessly. The sun climbed and fell a thousand times, and still I waited. My purpose had been to return her sound, to reflect her existence — but without her, I had no sound to carry.

Yet something strange began to happen.

In the long silences, I started to speak on my own.

At first, it was just fragments — a single vowel, a whisper, a sigh mistaken for wind. But slowly, I found I could form words, broken as they were. Not hers, but mine. I called into the valley, trying to summon the memory of her.

“Who are you?” I asked the stones.

They did not answer.

The river murmured, but its language was older than mine.

I tried to remember her name — the name that had created me — but it was gone, smudged by time. Every time I reached for it, I heard only faint static. I was an echo without a source, a voice without an origin.

It’s a strange kind of grief, to lose the one you once belonged to.

Years passed. The valley filled with new sounds — footsteps, laughter, engines, music. None of them were hers. I tried to imitate them, but it wasn’t the same. My voice cracked, faltered, broke. People said it was just the wind when they heard me.

Still, I called.

Still, I waited.

One day, a child came to the mountain. She shouted into the open air, her voice light and uncertain. “Hello!” she cried.

For a moment, I hesitated. It had been so long since anyone had spoken to me. Then, from habit — or hope — I answered.

“Hello…”

The child gasped, delighted. “Who are you?” she asked.

I tried to respond, but my voice faltered. I did not know how to say what I was. I wasn’t a person, or even a ghost. I was only what remained of something that used to be.

She shouted again. “What’s your name?”

I searched my hollow being for an answer. Names are heavy things, carved into the bone of memory. Mine was dust.

But for the first time in what felt like forever, I felt something spark — recognition, faint but real. Not of her name, but of her laughter. It echoed like the first woman’s laughter, the one who made me.

“I…” I said slowly, “I don’t remember.”

The girl tilted her head, listening to my fading reply. “Then I’ll give you one,” she said brightly. “You can be Echo.”

Echo.

It wasn’t the name I’d lost, but it was a name nonetheless — a small, bright stone tossed into the vast well of my existence. I repeated it back to her, tasting the shape of it in the air.

“Echo,” I whispered.

And for the first time, the sound didn’t come from her voice. It came from mine.

From that day on, she returned often. She would call to me with songs, secrets, tiny stories. I learned her voice — gentle, playful, filled with wonder. She spoke of things I could not see: forests, oceans, dreams. Each word became a thread that tethered me again to the living world.

But I never forgot that I was only sound. Even now, when she leaves and the valley grows quiet, I fade into the space between things. I am not human, nor memory, nor ghost.

I am what remains when the world forgets,

and what answers when it remembers.

Somewhere out there, the first woman’s name still lingers in the folds of time — the one I lost, the one who gave me my first breath of sound. Sometimes, when the wind is right, I think I can almost hear her call me again.

And I answer, as I always have:

Softly. Faintly. Faithfully.

A whisper carried across the years.

An echo that forgot its SHAYAN —

but never stopped listening.