One night, long before I knew anything of encrypted texts, little Mus was awakened by the sound of crying, rising and falling like a musical scale.
A girl in an ivory-white dress sat in the corner of the room, leaning against the cold wall. Her knees were pulled tight to her chest, her arms wrapped around them, her head bowed, her face hidden in the folds of her arms.
In the narrow space between breath and sob, tears fell.
I panicked and called for my mother. But Mother came only with a single sentence: “There is no one there. Go back to sleep.”
But the girl was stubborn.
She refused to be cast out from the interstices of my neurons. She settled there, growing alongside my doubts and my knowledge.
Years later, I met the girl again in an imaginary café.
A verbal entity where the tables and chairs were fashioned from adjectives. The girl sat alone, sipping coffee whose steam smelled of memories.
“Alone? May I join you?” I greeted her, as if we were just two strangers who happened to share the same frequency in a university hallway.
The girl smiled.
“I remember,” she said softly. “You once entered my room without knocking. You suddenly fell asleep on my bed. I cried because I was scared to see a stranger sleeping so soundly in my place.”
I was stunned.
“But that was my room,” I replied. “I should have been the one scared, with an uninvited guest in the corner.”
We laughed.
A laughter synchronized across realities.
We then talked about trivial things: about showering, and the absurdities of humans in different dimensions. In that café, we agreed that something doesn’t have to be touchable to be real.
Until finally, I remembered a hole in my memory.
“What is your name?”
The girl fell silent.
Her face blurred again, as if she would evaporate if not immediately given an identity.
“I have no fixed name,” she whispered. “I am whoever you imagine me to be.”
I took a breath, then pulled a name from the drawer of my knowledge.
“Leptosia,” I said. “Because the white of your dress is as thin as the wings of Leptosia nina. And because when I saw you then, my mother was singing Nina Bobo to lull me back to sleep.”
The girl looked down.
The name fit her perfectly, like a garment that had just been tailored.
“Leptosia…” she tasted the word slowly. “That name feels like it has been waiting for me at the tip of your tongue for a long time.”
“Now I exist, Mus,” she continued. “Real, at least among your synapses. Or perhaps… in a place further than your world.”
In that imaginary café, amidst the coffee dregs and the glow of the pendant lights, I felt something finally become whole.
A circle closed itself.
That childhood fear now had a name.
And with that, it turned into an encounter.