My voice isn't mine anymore.
It's not a metaphor. I mean it in the most literal, skin-prickling, gut-twisting way.
When I sing, there's a breath in my lungs that isn't mine. A pitch that slides under my own like silk catching on velvet. He's in there—woven into the melody, humming in the spaces between the notes. I feel him in my diaphragm, in the stretch of my throat, in the buzz against the back of my teeth when I hit a high note and something warmer than sound blooms inside me.
"You're flattening your vowels again," he says, his voice lazy in my head like a cat curling up in a sunbeam. "Try dropping your jaw a little more."
"I am dropping it," I mutter. I'm alone in the studio, but I still glance around like someone might be watching. My reflection in the glass is pale, sweat-slicked, twitchy.
"Not enough. You're still singing like you've got secrets in your molars."
"You're in my molars, Jinu."
He chuckles, that low, warm laugh that always made me flinch when I wasn't ready for how good it felt.
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Mira's shooting me looks. Not her usual skeptical half-glare—this one's quieter. Sharper. Like she's watching me for cracks.
Zoey's trying to keep things light, but I can hear the way her jokes bend under the weight of something unspoken. Everyone feels it. Something's off.
Because I'm not just singing anymore. I'm channeling.
"Rumi." Mira corners me during a break, her voice flat. "You're harmonizing with yourself. That's not normal."
I shrug. "Good mic layering?"
"No. It's like… like there's someone else singing with you."
I say nothing.
Because there is.
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At night, I don't dream the way I used to. It's not flashes of images or broken memories. It's music.
A forest of notes, tall and tangled. I walk barefoot across chords that shift under my feet like stones in a riverbed. In the distance, I always hear him. Jinu. Humming. Waiting.
One night, I find him.
Not as a ghost. Not as light. Just... him. Hair a little longer than I remember. Hoodie sleeves pushed to the elbows. Bare feet, standing in a field of reeds that shimmer like tuning forks.
"I thought you weren't real," I say, my voice hushed like wind through glass.
He grins. "I'm not. You're dreaming."
"But you feel real."
His eyes soften. "That's because you want me to."
I step closer. My fingers reach for his sleeve, but they pass through air. He doesn't pull away. He just watches me like I'm the song he never got to finish.
"Are you okay in there?" I whisper.
"In you?" he says, then smirks. "You're a little cramped, but you've got good acoustics."
I laugh. It hurts. It heals.
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The next morning, I wake up with tear tracks dried across my cheeks and a lyric I've never written scrawled in my own handwriting on the back of my hand:
Your silence is the loudest sound I carry.
I don't remember writing it.
But I remember feeling it.
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The girls find me in the studio, knees to my chest, head against the speaker.
Zoey brings bubble tea. Mira brings silence.
"Okay," I say, without them asking. "He's still here. In me."
Neither of them runs.
Instead, Zoey sets the tea down beside me and says, "Well, that explains the duet-from-hell vocal layers."
Mira sits. Cross-legged. Careful. Like she's afraid of stepping on something sacred.
"You love him," she says. It's not a question.
"I didn't get the chance to," I whisper. "Not properly. We were always too busy saving people. Saving each other."
She nods.
And that's it.
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That night, I start writing a new song.
I call it "Harmony Rewritten."
Not because I want to erase what happened.
But because I want to understand it. To name it. To sing it.
It's not about demons or salvation or even grief.
It's about this—about carrying someone inside you, and not letting that be a wound.
About choosing to live with love, even when it no longer has a face to touch.
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When I sing the first verse, Jinu hums the harmony without me asking.
When I reach the chorus, he's already there.
And when I hit the bridge, I hear his voice not in my head—but in the room.
I stop. My pulse stutters.
"Jinu?" My voice is a whisper.
He doesn't answer. Not with words.
But the air vibrates around me, warm and electric.
The mic picks it up.
The console lights flicker, just for a second. A breath.
He's closer now. Stronger.
Every note I sing draws him tighter into focus.
I press my fingers to the soundboard, and it hums back.
I sing again.
This time, I don't cry.