The House on Laurel Lane

When I was seven, I met someone who didn’t exist. Her name was Elsie, and she lived in the house on Laurel Lane. Everyone said the place was abandoned—empty since the fire that took the old woman who lived there alone. But I saw a little girl, just my age, watching me from the second-floor window, her hand pressed to the glass like she was trying to remember what touch felt like.

"She’s just your imagination," my mother told me, when I described the girl in the white dress with the honey-blonde curls. “That house hasn’t been lived in for years.”

But Elsie knew things. She knew I hated the smell of chalk and that I counted my steps when I was nervous. She knew my dad was gone and my mom cried when she thought I was asleep. Elsie became my best friend in the kind of way that only childhood allows—immediate, complete, and unquestioning.

We met every day after school in the backyard behind the Laurel house. The gate was always unlocked, though the hinges groaned like the wind had aged them. The garden had once been beautiful—brick paths now overrun with moss and rosebushes reaching like desperate arms. That’s where Elsie lived, she told me, though I never saw her go in or out of the house.

She told me stories—beautiful, strange stories—about a boy who could hear stars hum and a girl who traded her name for freedom. I asked her if she made them up.

“No,” she said softly. “They were dreams I had before I forgot how to dream.”

Sometimes I wondered if I was dreaming her. But if I was, it was a dream better than any waking life.

When I turned ten, we planted a cherry blossom tree in the far corner of the garden. Elsie said she wanted to leave something behind, something that would still grow even if everything else crumbled. I stole a sapling from my school’s garden project and carried it in my backpack like treasure. We dug with our hands and used rainwater from a cracked ceramic bowl she found beneath the porch.

That was the last day I ever saw her.

—

I’m thirty now, and the house on Laurel Lane is still empty.

I came back to the town I once called home, freshly divorced and lost in that way adults rarely admit to being. The world had gotten noisier. More concrete, less story. I didn’t mean to drive by Laurel Lane, but something—nostalgia, fate, maybe her—drew me there.

The house hadn’t changed much, though the paint was peeling more and the garden had lost all sense of itself. Except for the cherry blossom tree. It stood tall and delicate, in full bloom, pink petals raining like whispered secrets.

That night, I dreamed of her.

Elsie stood beneath the tree, looking just as she had at ten. Same white dress. Same curls. She smiled, tilted her head.

“You grew up,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to forget you,” I replied.

“I know. Most people do.”

I reached for her, but she stepped back. Her form flickered like a reflection in water.

“I’m not real,” she said, not with sadness, just truth.

“You were real to me.”

“That was enough.”

—

The next morning, I walked to Laurel Lane with a notebook. I sat beneath the cherry tree, petals in my hair, and I wrote. I wrote her stories. The ones she told me. The ones I’d forgotten. And new ones, too.

Each day, I returned, and each night, I dreamed. Sometimes she spoke. Sometimes she didn’t. But she was always there.

Until the dreams faded.

Until I was ready to let her go.

—

I published a book that year. It was called The Girl in the Garden. It became a surprise hit, the kind that finds lonely readers in quiet corners of the world. Letters came from people who said they, too, had imaginary friends they never really believed were imaginary. Others said the book helped them grieve the people they couldn’t quite name.

No one knew about Elsie.

No one but me.

And maybe the cherry blossom tree.

Author’s Note

Some people leave footprints; others leave petals. Elsie never existed. Or maybe she did, in the only way that matters: she helped me survive a time I didn’t know I was drowning. In a world that forgets magic too quickly, maybe she was the one thing I was never meant to remember—but couldn’t bear to forget.