The Girl Who Stole Tomorrow

The story began with a whisper, the kind that drifts through markets and tea houses, carried by people who love to speak of impossible things.

They said a girl had walked into the city with nothing in her hands, but by the time she left, she carried something no one else had ever dared to touch.

She carried tomorrow.

I was young, restless, and curious enough to believe in such stories. The city was not kind to dreamers, yet dreamers are the ones who keep it alive.

I searched for her. People described her differently—some said she was tall and silent, others swore she laughed like rain. No one could agree on her face.

But everyone remembered her eyes. They said her gaze was too heavy for one lifetime, as if she had seen both endings and beginnings.

One evening, while the city glowed in its own sleepless rhythm, I saw her. She was standing by the clock tower, staring at its hands with a quiet intensity. The crowd moved around her, yet none seemed to notice her presence.

I walked closer, though every step felt like moving against a tide I could not see.

“Are you the one who stole tomorrow?” I asked, though my voice trembled with both doubt and daring.

She turned, slowly. Her eyes caught mine, and in them I saw not years but centuries, folded neatly like pages of a book.

She did not deny it. She only smiled, faintly, as if my question had been waiting for me long before I was born.

“Tomorrow is fragile,” she said. “Too fragile to leave unguarded.”

Her words clung to me. I wanted to ask how one could steal something that had not yet existed, but her silence carried more weight than answers. She beckoned, and I followed.

We walked through narrow alleys where lamps flickered uncertainly, through markets that smelled of spices and iron, through streets that twisted like forgotten thoughts.

Finally, we reached the edge of the city where the walls met the sky. She raised her hand, and I saw it—tomorrow, shimmering faintly in the air like a glass sphere, pulsing softly with light.

It was beautiful, and terrifying.

“What will you do with it?” I asked.

Her expression was unreadable. “Keep it safe.

Time is too careless with its gifts. It rushes forward, throwing moments away as if they are nothing. But tomorrow—tomorrow deserves protection.”

I wanted to believe her. Yet something inside me whispered a warning. Was it truly protection, or was it control? A city without tomorrow is a city trapped in today forever.

As if sensing my thoughts, she spoke again. “Do you know why the city feels restless, why the people forget their own stories? Because tomorrow is missing. They live only in the weight of today, unable to see beyond.

Without me, they would break. Without me, there would be no path forward.”

Her voice was calm, but her words shook me. She wasn’t wrong. The city had felt strange, looping in repetition. Days bled into each other like colors in rain. People moved, worked, ate, slept, but their dreams had grown dim.

I thought it was only exhaustion, but now I wondered if it was her doing.

“Give it back,” I whispered, though I wasn’t sure if I meant it.

She tilted her head, studying me as though I were a puzzle. “Would you carry it, then? Would you guard tomorrow when even time itself cannot?”

Her question sliced through me. To hold tomorrow meant bearing the weight of every hope, every fear, every unfinished dream of the world. Could anyone truly bear it? My silence answered her.

She smiled again, softer this time. “That is why I carry it. Not to rule, not to hoard, but because no one else dares.

I will keep it until someone braver than me arrives.”

The sphere pulsed brighter, and for a brief second, I saw my own reflection within it—older, wearier, yet still searching. I understood then: she was not stealing tomorrow. She was saving it from being wasted.

When I turned to speak again, she was gone. The alley stood empty, the night thick with silence. Only the faint shimmer of light remained in the air, then vanished like breath on glass.

No one believed me when I told the story. They laughed, shook their heads, called it another dream of a restless boy. Yet every night, when the clock tower strikes and the city sleeps,

I feel her presence.

Somewhere beyond the edge of sight, the girl still walks, still guards, still carries the fragile gift of what is yet to come.

And so, tomorrow is safe—not because it belongs to us, but because she chose to steal it for us all.