Ashes

The train pulled away from the station just as the morning sun peeked through the fog—pale, distant, disinterested. Noor didn’t look back. Not once. Everything that needed burning had already turned to ash.

Her phone was dead—intentionally. Her name wasn’t Noor anymore, not here, not anywhere this train was headed. She sat stiffly in her seat, a weathered green backpack on her lap. Inside, a few essentials: three changes of clothes, a worn-out novel, a notebook filled with poems written in invisible ink, and a bundle of stolen courage.

Running away wasn’t dramatic like movies made it seem. It was cold. Quiet. A series of irreversible, tiny steps. Noor had taken her first one a week ago when she’d dyed her hair in the sink of a 24-hour gas station, scrubbing out the past with cheap dye and shaking hands. Step two had been forging new ID papers—badly. She didn’t expect them to pass a real test. But she wasn't going anywhere that required scrutiny. She was headed where no one cared about names.

The man sitting across from her looked up from his newspaper, probably wondering if she was running from a man, a marriage, or something worse. He didn’t ask. People who travel alone tend to respect each other’s silences.

She liked that about travel.

Outside, the landscape shifted from concrete to forest. Trees clawed at the window like they wanted to whisper secrets only she could understand. Disappear quietly, they seemed to say. Leave no echoes behind.

That was the hardest part—not the leaving, but the erasing. She had lived her life pressed tightly between pages written by someone else. Daughter. Wife. Problem. None of those titles had room for her poems or dreams. She'd whispered truths into empty rooms, only to be told she was ungrateful. She learned to fold herself smaller and smaller until she was little more than an outline.

But ashes were honest. They didn't pretend. And she had burned it all—the photos, the letters, the memories. Not because they didn’t matter. But because they mattered too much.

---

Three towns over, in a motel that smelled like forgotten cigarettes and old prayers, Noor pressed the pen to her new journal. It was leather-bound, bought secondhand, and smelled faintly of someone else’s past.

She wrote:She was learning how to be a shadow.

She worked odd jobs—washing dishes in a café, restocking shelves at night, sweeping church floors. Nobody asked questions. Nobody cared that she avoided mirrors or flinched when the door slammed too hard. They called her Ana. It was the name she gave herself—short, soft, and rootless.

And slowly, Ana began to grow where Noor had withered.

Her hands, once used only to clean and cook for others, now wrote poems into the margins of library books and folded napkins. She hid them like wildflowers in cracks of public benches and telephone poles—hope for someone else trying to vanish. Her favorite one read:

Sometimes, she wondered if someone from her past might stumble upon one. Would they recognize her voice in the lines? Would they care?

She shook the thought away like a wet coat. The goal wasn’t to be remembered. It was to be free.

---

One evening, at the edge of town, Ana met a woman named Rae who lived in a converted van painted in constellations. Rae sold handmade soaps and believed in stars and second chances. She offered Ana a ride, no questions asked. They drove through mountain passes where the fog clung to the glass like breath, sharing silence and occasional smiles.

Rae didn’t ask Ana who she had been. She only asked what she wanted to become.

“I don’t know,” Ana admitted.

“That’s the best place to start,” Rae said.

They stopped by a lake at dawn. Rae brewed coffee on a tiny burner and handed Ana a chipped mug. The lake mirrored the sky so perfectly Ana felt like she might fall into it and keep falling forever.

“You ever burn something just to see it go?” Ana asked.

Rae nodded. “Not everything that burns is meant to be mourned.”

Ana watched as the steam from her cup curled into the morning like breath. She thought of Noor—not with regret, but with gratitude. Noor had walked through fire so Ana could stand here, whole.

---

Weeks later, Ana stepped off another train in a different town with a name she didn’t know how to pronounce. She rented a room above a bookstore and found work binding old books and organizing poetry readings. People liked her quiet presence and warm smile. No one asked about scars or history.

Every night, she’d write a new poem. Not hidden this time. Not secret. She pinned them to the café bulletin board and left some in open books on the shelves.

And then one day, she signed a poem with her old name.

Just once.

Not to be found.

But to forgive.

---

Because ashes do not lie.

They only tell you what once burned.

And what refused to die.