Haunting Notes

Every year, the anniversary of her kidney transplant sneaks up on Noelle, leaving her feeling oddly grateful and unsettled at the same time. In the days before she starts losing things. Not just her keys, which she found in the freezer next to the peas, but her train of thought, mid-sentence. She craves a quiet that feels impossible, a silence so deep it could swallow the hum of the refrigerator. One random afternoon, while wandering the library, she finds a folded note tucked in a book:

“This life is borrowed, but still yours to live.”

She blinked, looked around the empty aisle, then tucked the note into her pocket, chalking it up to a strange coincidence.

But then the notes multiplied. One waited for her in the pocket of her hoodie, another in her favorite coffee mug, a third slipped under her pill bottles. Each one seemed to know her a little better—mentioning yesterday’s worries, last week’s dreams, things she hadn’t said out loud to anyone.

Noelle thanked her husband for the sweet notes and asked how he knew the intimate details, but he denied it all. At night, Noelle lay awake, if it wasn’t him, who was it?

She tried to shrug it off, but curiosity quickly turned to obsession. Noelle began retracing her days, trying to catch the mysterious note-leaver in the act. She tried to casually ask the barista—a teenager with purple hair who seemed more interested in her phone—if anyone had been near her table, but the question came out sounding paranoid. She spent an hour trying to get the library's security footage, only to be stonewalled by a privacy policy. She even opened Google Maps for her husband's truck, then immediately felt a hot spike of shame. What was she even looking for?

Through it all, the notes kept coming, each one more intimate than the last. They didn’t just echo her fears and hopes; they whispered secrets she thought she’d forgotten.

Noelle tugged open the neglected kitchen junk drawer, searching for a notepad to jot down the name of a documentary a coworker had mentioned. Instead, her fingers landed on a crumpled yellow receipt, folded in half with words scrawled across the back.

"You cried at the commercial today. You never used to cry at commercials."

She frowned. The handwriting was unmistakably hers. Same curling tails on the y’s, same wide-mouthed o’s. But she didn’t remember writing it.

She dug deeper.

Post-its. Torn corners of envelopes. A notecard stained with what looked like coffee. Half a greeting card. Each one bore her hand—and her voice—but spoke with the kind of clarity that only comes from a distance. From observation, not participation.

"You keep touching your scar like you expect it to answer you."

“You held your breath when you walked past the hospital wing. No one asked you to.”

"You stopped apologizing to your body. Just for a moment. But still you worry."

That night, Noelle sat at the edge of the bed long after her husband had fallen asleep, the stack of notes trembling slightly in her hands. It wasn’t just the handwriting anymore. It was the timing. These weren’t messages to her. They were records—moments she’d lived but refused to admit mattered.

She started flipping the notes over. A few had dates, small and faded. Others had been torn from old receipts—grocery lists, pharmacy pickups, even one marked with the logo of her old dialysis clinic. She hadn’t been there in years. Had she written these in the waiting room? On the way home?

She could almost picture it—her hand moving while her mind drifted. The scribble of feeling too heavy to carry in her chest. What did she think would happen with them? That she’d forget? That they’d disappear?

A breeze from the cracked kitchen window stirred the papers. She caught one before it fluttered under the fridge.

“You laughed so hard you forgot to be afraid. It lasted eight seconds.”

Noelle pressed her hand gently over the scar low on her abdomen—the one she rarely touched unless she was alone.

“Maybe eight seconds was enough,” she whispered. “Maybe that’s what healing starts with.”

She waited until her husband was out running errands and the house was quiet.

No dishes humming in the dishwasher, no dog barking at the neighbors. Just the low hum of the fridge and the soft scratch of her pen on paper.

Noelle kept it simple.

"If this is me," she wrote, "then I’ll remember hiding it."

She folded the note twice, then slipped it behind the cookbooks on the bottom kitchen shelf—the one with the bent metal frame and the outdated slow-cooker guides they never used.

Three days passed. No new notes. No accidents. No signs.

Then, on the fourth day, she woke to a note taped to the bathroom mirror.

It was her handwriting. But different. Lighter. Tilted slightly left, like someone had written it leaning against their knee. The ink was a soft blue. Not one of her pens.

"You thought I was a ghost. Maybe I am. But you're the one who learned how to live."

Beneath it, faintly traced in the corner:

"Thank you—for carrying us both."

Noelle stared at her reflection, uncertain whether to feel comforted or undone.

Her scar ached in recognition.

The next morning, she made coffee and didn’t check her phone. Didn’t check the drawer. Didn’t check the mirror.

Instead, she opened her journal—the one she'd abandoned halfway through recovery, half-filled with medication logs and lopsided gratitude.

She tore out a blank page and wrote slowly. Her hand didn’t shake.

"We made it."

She folded the note, then walked to the trail by the lake. The same one she used to walk during dialysis, legs heavy, lungs bitter with effort. There was a split in the bark of a tree there, hollowed and scarred, as if nature had once been opened and stitched closed again.

She tucked the note into the split and pressed it in with two fingers.

A soft wind blew behind her. She didn’t turn around.

She walked home lighter, not because the haunting had stopped—but because she no longer needed to know whose voice it was. It had never really mattered.

She had carried it. She had listened. She had lived.